Archives Portal Europe

The Archives Portal Europe is the domain aggregator for archives from and about Europe. Established in the context of two EU-funded projects between 2009 and 2015, the Archives Portal Europe since is maintained and developed further by the Archives Portal Europe Foundation. It provides an overview of the collections kept in European archival institutions by publishing so called finding aids (inventories of archives) along with other contextual information and links those to the digitised archival material itself as much as possible. The portal holds information on more than 7,000 archival institutions from over 30 countries, of which over 1,000 actively contribute content.

In addition to data publication, Archives Portal Europe also supports its providers with or offers:

• Storage of metadata files in archival standard formats,
• Mapping from custom data formats to archival standard formats,
• Data conversion,
• Data validation,
• Dissemination for institutions about usage of backend on demand (usually executed by Country Managers responsible for the institutions of the partner countries).

Technical conditions for working with Archives Portal Europe:

• Metadata should ideally be provided in one of the international archival standards (EAD – either EAD 2002 or EAD3, EAC-CPF, EAG) or other XML formats,
• Providing data to the Archives Portal Europe can either be done directly by the content provider or via existing national, regional or thematic portals in the various partner countries.

An introduction to providing data to Archives Portal Europe is given in this short video and there is more detailed information available on Archives Portal Europe Wiki. Providers to the Archives Portal Europe also can make their data available through the portal’s API. To access, register a user account at archivesportaleurope.net, then retrieve API key. Please note that only data from archival institutions can be retrieved, which have explicitly given permission. An online manual for usage is available.

Limitations: None

Financial conditions: Associates of the Archives Portal Europe Foundation (APEF) pay a yearly membership fee in accordance with their budget. Providing content to the Archives Portal Europe incl. the support mentioned above is free of charge.