Posted on 11 February 2015
The Historical Archives of the European Union has recently published the information of its archival holdings from European Union Institutions on the Archives Portal Europe. Almost 3,700 records are now available in the Portal describing the EU historical archives of the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Investment Bank, the European Court of Auditors and the European Economic and Social Committee.
The Archives Portal Europe is a milestones achieved by APEx project (The Archives Portal Europe network of excellence) supported by the European Commission. The project's consortium currently consists of 33 partners from 32 countries.
Previously, users had to visit various archival websites for their research. The Archives Portal Europe enables them now to find information more efficiently from millions of archival materials stored in hundreds of archival institutions. The Historical Archives of the European Union has actively collaborated in this project to boost connections for both archival professionals and the users to EU Institutions’ archives.
Another objective is to deliver data to Europeana, another flagship European Commission project, to build a single access point for online cultural heritage collections from libraries, archives, museums, and audio-visual domains. It makes archival material searchable and findable within its cross-domain approach of presenting cultural heritage objects online.
Since 2012 the Historical Archives of the European Union in partnership with the Archives services of EU Institutions took considerable steps to standardise the common approach to archival description and to create tools to manage and publish complex archival data. The main goal was to meet users' expectations by providing access to the various archival resources held throughout Europe.
To publish data on the Archives Portal Europe, the EU Institutions with coordination by the Historical Archives in Florence mapped their standardised descriptive and authoritative records with the international XML schemas EAD, EAC-CPF and EAG.
Access to the EU Institutions’ inventories in the Archives Portal Europe