Building infrastructures for archives in a

digital world

Date: 26 – 28 June 2013 Venue: Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2

Note: Each session starts with a keynote which is marked like this:

Table of contents

SESSION 1.1

STRATEGIC ISSUES FOR ARCHIVES IN A DIGITAL WORLD 6

Thomas Aigner (ICARUS, AT)

International cooperation as a precondition for building infrastructures 6

Daniel Jeller (ICARUS, AT)

The digital age: opportunities to ensure access to our cultural heritage 6

Boris Blažinić (Institute for quality and human resource development)

How to raise visibility: archive’s hidden treasuries 6

Herbert Wurster (Diocese of Passau, DE)

Persistent-meta-data, the keeping of records and archival science 7

SESSION 1.2

OPEN DATA AND LICENSING 8

Julia Fallon (IPR & Policiy Advisor Europeana)

Open data and licensing (legal aspects, consequences for accessibility, economic aspects, copyright,

creative commons etc.) 8

Walter Scholger (Centre for Information Modelling in the Humanities Graz, AT)

Archives and the 'digital turn': challenges, opportunities and possible solutions to Open Access, provision and

use of archival resources 8

Martin Fries (Swiss Federal Archives, CH)

Everything online? Dealing with data protection issues 9

Dorota Drzewiecka, Katarzyna Pepłowska (Nicolaus Copernicus University of Torun, PL)

Access to Polish archival material: legal dilemmas 10

SESSION 1.3

LINKING OF DATA – INTERDISCIPLINARY COOPERATION 11

Jane Stevenson (Archives Hub, GB)

A Licence to Thrill: the exciting potential of open data 11

Eddy Put (State Archives Belgium, BE)

Pleading the case for a flora of archives 12

Francesca Di Donato (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, IT)

Burckhardtsource.org. A semantic archive 12

Damiana Luzzi (Digital Renaissance Foundation, IT), Irene Pedretti (Historical Archives of the Pontifical

Gregorian University, Rome, IT)

An ontology for APUG: problem, method and solution 12

SESSION 1.4

USERS OF ARCHIVISTIC CONTENT NOW AND IN THE FUTURE 14

Stefano Vitali (Soprintendenza Archivistica per l’Emilia Romagna, IT)

Archivists and users in the virtual searching room 14

Stephane Gierts (Council of the European Union)

Archival access and online archives of the Council of the European Union – Considering the user perspective14

Steffen Hennicke (Berlin School of Library and Information Science, DE)

Modelling the information needs of archival users 15

Petra Links (NIOD – Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, NL) & Reto Speck (NIOD, Research

Associate at Centre for e-Research, King’s College London, GB) Research infrastructures and archival inter-

mediation 15

SESSION 1.5

BUILDING NEW PARTNERSHIPS 16

Laura Gould (Lothian Health Services Archive, GB) & Gunivere Barlow (Carmichael Watson Project, GB)

Small Scale, Big Change – the impact of social media 16

Doreen Kelimes (City Archives Speyer, DE)

The eastern and north-eastern European archives between digitisation, Web 2.0 and social media 16

Alexander Schatek (Topothek, AT)

“Let the crowd work”. Creating a Virtual Archive by Local Units 17

Peter Moser (Archives of Rural History, CH)

Virtual archives: a new solution to old problems? 17

Tom Cobbaert (Archief 2.0, NL)

ArchiefWiki, the collaborative success of independent knowledge sharing 18

SESSION 1.6

ARCHIVAL CONTENT IN DIDACTIC PRACTICE 20

Antonella Ambrosio (UNINA – Università degli Studi di NapoliFederico II, IT)

Charters and digital archives in the didactic practice 20

Hrvoje Stančić, Arian Rajh, Edvin Bursić (Department of Information and Communication Sciences,

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, HR)

Archival education activities in the online environment 20

Maria Gussarson Wijk (APEx, Swedish National Archives, SE)

The Archives Portal Europe and its possible uses in the upper secondary school: the Swedish Global college

example 21

Artur Dirmeier & Kathrin Pindl (Spitalarchiv Regensburg, DE)

Spitalarchiv: didactic practice in a digital world 21

SESSION 2.1

ARCHIVAL METADATA AND STANDARDS FOR DIGITAL ARCHIVES 23

Daniel Pitti (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, US)

The emerging archival metadata landscape 23

Karin Bredenberg (National Archives of Sweden, SE)

Record creators: use of EAC-CPF in the Archives Portal Europe 23

Kerstin Arnold (Technical Coordinator APEx, Federal Archives of Germany, DE)

EAD revision and its effects on the Archives Portal Europe 24

Maud Medves (CENDARI project, DE)

EAG CENDARI: customising EAG for research purposes 24

SESSION 2.2

BEST PRACTICE: IT’S TOOL TIME! 26

Susanne Waidmann (Federal Archives of Germany, DE)

The Archives Portal Europe: the adventure of presenting multicultural and multilingual information on

archival material, its creators and their repositories in just one tool 26

Bastiaan Verhoef (APEx, Nationaal Archief, NL)

The backend of the Archives Portal Europe: lessons learned and challenges waiting (provisional) 26

Jochen Graf (University of Cologne, DE)

Transcription, contextualization and peer review: the ‘Monasterium Collaborative Archives’ 27

Eoghan Ó Carragáin (National Library of Ireland, IE), Luke O'Sullivan (Swansea Univesity Library, IE)

Archival collections in Vufind 27

SESSION 2.3

BEST PRACTICE: FROM CARDBOARD BOXES TO EUROPEAN E-ARCHIVES 29

Zoltán Szatucsek (National Archives of Hungary, HU)

Search all, find more: access to the Archival Database Service in Hungary 29

Maria Popkovacheva-Terzieva (Archives State Agency of Bulgaria, BG)

Archives State Agency: attempts to popularize its digital holdings 29

Peter Fleer (Swiss Federal Archives, CH)

Interpretation of digital records 32

John Cox (National University of Ireland, IE)

The Abbey Theatre Archive Digitization Project: challenges and opportunities 33

Grace Toland (Irish Traditional Music Archive, IE)

The Irish Traditional Music Archive & The Inishowen Song Project 33

SESSION 2.4

BEST PRACTICE: SUSTAINING DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN THE LONG RUN 35

Hrvoje Stančić, Arian Rajh (Department of Information and Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities

and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, HR), Edvin Buršić (Financial Agency, HR)

Using Archival Information Packages for production of sustainable archival collections of digitised records 35

Giovanni Ciccaglioni (ICUU – Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, IT)

Digital cultural heritage and e-infrastructures 35

Salvatore Vasallo (Instituti Centrale per gli Archivi, IT)

The Archival Resource Catalogue within the Italian National Archival System 36

Armin Straube (German National Library, DE)

Frameworks for digital preservation 37

SESSION 2.5

BEST PRACTICE: BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURES ON A NATIONAL LEVEL 38

Vlatka Lemić (Croatian State Archives, HR) 38

Christina Wolf & Gerald Maier (State Archives Baden-Württemberg, DE)

Building a German archives portal: development of a national platform for archival information within the

German Digital Library 38

István Kenyeres (Budapest City Archives, HU)

Archives Portal Hungary: asolution for joint publication of databases and digitized archival materials 39

Karol Krawczyk (Head Office of State Archives, PL)

Holdings accessible online: the Polish experience 39

Chezkie Kasnett (The National Library of Israel, IL)

The historical archive reborn: approach and strategy for the Archive network 40

SESSION 2.6

BEST PRACTICE: BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURES ON AN INTERNATIONAL LEVEL 43

Manfred Thaller, Jochen Graf, Sebastian Rose, Andre Streicher (University of Cologne, DE)

Network(s) for Europe’s charters: a proven blueprint for an international infrastructure 43

Gerold Ritter & Jonas Arnold (Archives Online, CH)

Archives Online: real time searched in 13 archives without redundant data 43

Henk Harmsen (DARIAH-EU)

DARIAH: the adventure of building an infrastructure 44

Anna Bohn & Aleksandra Pawłiczek (CENDARI project, DE)

CENDARI: building up a research infrastructure on The First World War across borders 45

Session 1.1

Strategic issues for archives in a digital world

Thomas Aigner (ICARUS, AT)

International cooperation as a precondition for building infrastructures

tba

Daniel Jeller (ICARUS, AT)

The digital age: opportunities to ensure access to our cultural heritage

The digitisation of archival material that started in the late 20th century is an important factor in

determining the manner in which we as a society will make use of the diverse documents stored in

our public and private archives in the future. My presentation gives an overview of the effects that

this new cultural practice has on how we perceive digitised historical material in relation to its

physical counterpart and to describe the unique opportunities that arise out of these developments

for the archival world as a whole. I will show that the technological advantages in the fields of digital

imaging, data storage and data distribution provide archives with a wide array of possibilities in

which they can improve how they can serve their users and at the same time ensure their important

role as the societies long term memory and a crucial guardian of our combined cultural heritage.

Boris Blažinić (Institute for quality and human resource development)

How to raise visibility: archive’s hidden treasuries

In the eyes of the beholder archives are usually seen as our historical memory or its guardians.

Archives keep the rich and unique documentary heritage and make them available to the public.

Information and evidence contained in the archives relate to the past and present life of our society

in many different ways and have potential to meet the needs and expectations of a wide variety of

users. In this sense then, why are archives rather invisible to the public compared to other cultural

institutions and centres? My presentation deals with general principles, strategies and techniques of

visibility from the psychological perspective and how they can be used in archives to raise their

visibility (that is become more attractive to the public).

Herbert Wurster (Diocese of Passau, DE)

Persistent-meta-data, the keeping of records and archival science

Archival storage procedures are well established as far as the "originals" are concerned. But the

technical development of the past century has brought several new technical ways of providing

access to the records and of preserving them in another medium e. g. substitution microfilms. Each

new medium has developed its own strategy of description, especially in the field of how to refer to

record groups and call numbers. New ways of archival description through database supported

archival programmes have had similar results. As a consequence, the coherence between the various

new media, the "original" sources and the information contained in established finding aids has often

been broken. It is therefore necessary to reconsider the basic principles of archival science in order

to keep intact the usability of the wealth of information of traditional finding aids and to keep alive

the correlation i. e. the meta-identity between the "originals" records and meta-records for access

and substantial preservation.

Session 1.2

Open data and licensing

Julia Fallon (IPR & Policiy Advisor Europeana)

Open data and licensing (legal aspects, consequences for

accessibility, economic aspects, copyright,

creative commons etc.)

Europeana brings together the digitized content of Europe's galleries, libraries, museums, archives

and audiovisual collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to over 25 million books,

films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 2,200 content providers. The

content is drawn from every European member state and the interface is in 29 European languages.

Europeana receives its main funding from the European Commission.

Behind Europeana lies a series of framework and tools that enables the standardised, free and open

sharing of metadata. Furthermore, supporting the core Europeana service are a number of projects

and initiatives that improve upon the basic service by focusing on industry, social or legal aspects of

making content available. For example Europeana is developing three pilot creative communities

using the principles of the commons to demonstrate the impact commons can have within a

network, through to initiatives such as the Rights Labelling Campaign which aims to deliver

improvements in the presence and quality of metadata, specifically Licence information.

All of this is made possible by the Europeana Licensing Framework - guiding the provision and use of

data by both users and providers under the basic principles that metadata is provided under a CC0

Licence. The Europeana framework will be presented along with an exploration of the issues it

tackles, the services it enables, finding with a brief look to the future of the framework.

More information can be found at http://www.europeana.eu/portal

Walter Scholger (Centre for Information Modelling in the Humanities Graz, AT)

Archives and the 'digital turn': challenges, opportunities and possible solutions to

Open Access, provision and use of archival resources

Archives can draw on ample and rich experience regarding the access to their material and the terms

of its use. Apart from well-established and proven procedures within the archives themselves, they

can rely on equally established legal terms and practices, with relatively small differences between

European countries.

The current national and international legislature, however, primarily governs the access to and use

of physical archival material in situ at the actual archive. The legislature regarding digital resources

and digital archives is still underdeveloped and leaves much room for insecurity and interpretation.

Principle issues of intellectual property rights, copyright and privacy remain unresolved, but the

tendency of international bodies towards open and unrestricted access, especially for the purposes

of education and research, is evident. Initiatives like Creative Commons offer a means to protect the

interests of individual creators, while providing the public with open access to their work.

While archives have well-established and proven ways regarding the access to and use of physical

archival material, there is little experience with the different roles the same archives can take in the

digital world: An archive may act as a host of their own digital archive, or provide data to an external

online portal; it may autonomously digitise its material or leave that task to external experts. These

different roles also call for different legal frameworks, terms of use and forms of collaboration.

The lack of legislative and procedural strictures allows for unique synergy opportunities: Open access

to archival resources enables the close and interactive collaboration between archives and expert

researchers, enriching both the quality of the scholarly work and the quality of the archival resource

(in terms of the information and knowledge about the individual resource, its context and relations

to other resources).

This presentation will showcase some of the challenges regarding the provision and usage of digital

(and digitised) archival resources, using the example of Monasterium.net. Monasterium.net has

developed into the largest virtual archive of medieval and early modern deeds worldwide: It offers

access to more than 250.000 documents and continues to expand through a network of more than

50 European partner institutions.

Copyright and Provision issues that surfaced during the establishment of the Monasterium portal will

be used to demonstrate the shortcomings and challenges of the existing legal frameworks (from a

national Austrian and a broader European perspective). The project’s attempts at possible solutions

will be demonstrated and put forward to discussion with the expert audience.

A number of legal texts addressing the aforementioned different roles were created for use with

Monasterium. The portal supports the concept of Open Access and promotes the Creative Commons

licenses as a role model for the publication of knowledge, research and education resources.

Martin Fries (Swiss Federal Archives, CH)

Everything online? Dealing with data protection issues

One of the strategic goals of the Swiss Federal Archives is the development of a comprehensive range

of online user services comprising finding aids and digitally accessible content. One important

element of the digital access is the Online Search on www.swiss-archives.ch. Behind this web-based

access to our finding aids is a database where our holdings are indexed down to the level of a

dossier.

The legal framework in Switzerland poses an extra challenge as not all available metadata can be

published online. The Federal Act on Archiving and data protection laws prohibit the publication of

finding aids when they contain “sensitive personal data“ and the records are still within their closure

period. When designing and implementing www.swiss-archives.ch we had to address legal, technical

and organisational issues on the one hand, on the other hand a so-called Onsite Search has to be

built which can be accessed in our reading rooms only. This tool thus provides a database access to

our entire finding aids and gives a complete overview of all records. My presentation describes the

challenges the Swiss Federal Archives had to face and the solutions chosen on our path to digital

access.

Dorota Drzewiecka, Katarzyna Pepłowska (Nicolaus Copernicus University of Torun,

PL)

Access to Polish archival material: legal dilemmas

Ensuring friendly, continuous and safe access to information resources and the archival materials

collected in the archive, to every citizen at any time and in any place, is one of the basic tasks to be

completed in the Polish archives. Only recently have the Polish archives entered the digital era. That

process creates new problems of legal nature to be solved by the archives. This presentation shall

summarise the results of our research on Polish state law regarding Open Access. Our legal analysis

will identify those areas that need to be amended especially now in the digital era. This is especially

important since the archives as government agencies must respect regulation on personal data

protection, copyright, intellectual property protection and other rights related to the protection of

privacy. Knowledge of these legal restrictions is essential for the functioning of digital archives. With

this in mind, it becomes obvious that any project related to digitisation of archives cannot violate

individual rights guaranteed.

Since legal issues are complex and tedious, our presentation will focus on the practical side and is

therefore based on case studies.

Session 1.3

Linking of data – interdisciplinary cooperation

Jane Stevenson (Archives Hub, GB)

A Licence to Thrill: the exciting potential of open data

Open data is well and truly on the agenda, in the news and at the forefront of the information

environment. To open up data means to share, to exchange, to reuse. It means unlocking the power

of information. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, is making it his mission, and he

has given inspiring presentations in support of the ‘Web of Data’. Linked Open Data has become a

major movement in favour of the open data agenda. But what does this mean for archivists and

other information professionals? Have we really embraced open data, or are we still trying to

control, to drip-feed, to assume we know what people need and want? Are we inhibiting innovation?

Are we making sure that we support and encourage the exciting possibilities for research that are

opened up by the Web and by new technologies?

The potential that open and reusable data gives us requires a leap of imagination, to embrace a

world where data flows freely. We may need to lose old assumptions about the role of the archivist

and gain more understanding of the digital landscape. But there are legitimate concerns about open

data, particularly around intellectual property rights. So, we need to consider what can be open, how

it can be made explicitly open, and what legitimate limitations we place upon it, either because of

copyright or valuable income streams. What does Creative Commons provide? Where does freedom

of information and data protection come into this? What about the importance of trust and

integrity? How do we balance our concerns against the business case that can be made for opening

up our data? Is the distinction between data and metadata important?

We need to be clear: open data is here, and both expectations and technology will continue to push

us in this direction. By doing nothing we simply fall behind. By taking appropriate measures to open

up our data we raise the profile of archives. There is a compelling business case and there are

persuasive moral and ethical arguments. To move forwards we need to clarify what ‘open’ means,

we need to understand the landscape we are working within, we need to work together, and we

need to understand what we can all do to ensure our resources are at the forefront of scholarship

and innovation. APEx and the Archives Portal Europe provide the perfect opportunity to move

forwards, to embrace open data and to work together to ensure that archives are central to the

progress of knowledge.

Eddy Put (State Archives Belgium, BE)

Pleading the case for a flora of archives

The opacity of formally described items is an old crux. Archivists are confronted with the limits of

accessibility when they describe items in a purely formal way (accounts, sentencebooks, notarial

deeds etc.). This is especially the case in early modern serial archives. Traditional finding aids don't

highlight these high-quality backbone series. ISAD(G) descriptive element 'Title' (3.1.2), borrowed

from library science, enforces the misunderstanding: users don't always have the archival intelligence

to understand the relationship between the archival item and its representation.

Documentary form has been studied extensively. The authority lists on documentary forms used by

national archives are useful, but there is still a lot of work to do. A European ‘flora of archives’ or a

thesaurus of documentary forms is not only useful for archivists, but can be a very important

instrument for researchers to recognize and assess document types, especially of the early modern

period. The real challenge for the future of the archival profession is not only the opening of massive

content, but also the creative unlocking of archival forms.

Francesca Di Donato (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, IT)

Burckhardtsource.org. A semantic archive

http://www.burckhardtsource.org is a result of the ongoing ERC-Advanced Project “The European

Correspondence to Jacob Burckhardt” (June 2011-May 2014), which aims at making publicly

accessible the critical edition of the letters to the Swiss scholar. The platform hosts the digitised

manuscripts of the letters to Jacob Burckhardt from 1842 to 1897. The proposed presentation will be

focused on the illustration of the website, which is built on Muruca (www.muruca.org), and on its

more innovative features based on Linked data technologies, through which Burckhardtsource.org is

made interoperable with the Web of Data. An important part of the presentation will be devoted to

Pundit (www.thepund.it), a semantic annotator integrated within the platform, which enables users

to create structured data annotating web pages and to collect annotations in notebooks and share

them with others, in order to create collaborative structured knowledge.

Damiana Luzzi (Digital Renaissance Foundation, IT), Irene Pedretti (Historical Archives

of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, IT)

An ontology for APUG: problem, method and solution

Historical Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University (APUG) own a complex and heterogeneous

documental material: manuscripts, printed texts noted by author or teacher, sometimes considered

hybrids printed-manuscript. The use of archival or library standards are not sufficient to express this

complexity. In addition to represent the physical structure, state of conservation and restoration, it

was necessary to bring out context and network of relationships among documents, agents,

activities, places, events and periods to reconstruct the history of education, models, subjects taught

and their evolution within the Roman College (Jesuits school) and influence in Europe and in the

world. We present the problem, how it was solved and the methodology used to create an OWL

ontology developed in a bottom-up approach: starting from the analysis of real data, using an

iterative process, we have reached interoperability and alignment with international standards

(CIDOC-CRM, EAC, EAD, EDM, FRBR-oo, etc.). Each class, property and instance is identified by URI to

use as Linked Data.

Session 1.4

Users of archivistic content now and in the future

Stefano Vitali (Soprintendenza Archivistica per

l’Emilia Romagna, IT)

Archivists and users in the virtual searching room

The advent of the Internet and the publication of finding aids and other research tools on the Web

have deeply changed the way in which archival institutions provide access to their holdings and

communicate with their users. At the same time, users of archives have expanded and changed, both

from the point of view of their education and cultural background and of their research interests and

purposes.

In a traditional environment, users became familiar with archival research strategies, procedures and

tools mostly thanks to interviews and conversations with the reference archivists in the search room,

today finding aids and digital reproductions of documents make their journey on the web, alone,

without an archivist who can help users to understand their meaning and how to make use of them.

How are archival institutions facing this new situation? How they can establish a better and more

direct connection with users of archives?

The development of new types of search tools and the intelligent application of web 2.0 technologies

can help archivists to address the challenge of communicating with their users in the new virtual

search rooms on the Web.

Stephane Gierts (Council of the European Union)

Archival access and online archives of the Council of the European Union –

Considering the user perspective

The Council of the European Union has evolved recently from a provider of historical archives

content in paper or microform format to a provider of digital content. This presentation will reflect

on digital archives, the evolutions in archival research, archival requests and the users of the

Council's archives.

A mass digitisation of the historical archives of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC),

European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC) until 1974

has been executed during the last years.

Where researchers up to recently needed to consult the Council's historical archives on microforms,

it is now possible to obtain the archives in digital format. This results in new possibilities for

accessibility, communication and enhanced searching & retrieval, to meet the expectations of

contemporary users looking for archival collections.

Steffen Hennicke (Berlin School of Library and Information Science, DE)

Modelling the information needs of archival users

The work presented originates from an ongoing dissertation project at the Berlin School of Library

and Information Science. It gives empirical insight into the nature of written user enquiries in free

text to the German Federal Archives and investigates how patterns of enquiries can be reasonably

represented in an ontological model in order to produce adequate answers for the user. Existing

archival knowledge bases can be supplemented with such ontological models. The methodological

approach focuses on the interpretation of the enquiries in order to discover the implicit questions

with regard to a certain domain of discourse; in the scope of this work, the archival domain of record

keeping and the historical domain of social history. The identified patterns are modelled in CIDOC

CRM. The result of the analysis is an ontological model which represents enquiry patterns of different

abstraction levels to archives in the form of queries to this ontology. The presentation will discuss the

“Documentation-Activity” pattern and its ontological representation. It is one of the first and most

prominent discoveries from the analysis so far. Concrete examples will show in what way this pattern

is able to answer a wide range of user enquiries.

Petra Links (NIOD – Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, NL) & Reto

Speck (NIOD, Research Associate at Centre for e-Research, King’s College London,

GB)

Research infrastructures and archival inter-mediation

The development of infrastructures is transforming the way archives operate and interact with

researchers. The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project - a trans-European

endeavour of 20 institutions to integrate descriptions of Holocaust-related sources in an online portal

- is at the forefront of such developments, therefore providing us with glimpses of what the future

archive in the digital world will look like.

Our presentation will reflect on our experience of formulating user requirements for the EHRI

project, and particularly on interviews we undertook with user-facing archivists working at partner

institutions. We will argue that current discussions about infrastructure building in the humanities

largely miss one vital aspect of archival research: the considerable amount to which archivists

mediate researchers' access to material. Highlighting the importance of inter-mediation in current

research practices, we will show that a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between archivists,

researchers and archives is one of the most important opportunities infrastructure building offers.

Session 1.5

Building new partnerships

Laura Gould (Lothian Health Services Archive, GB) & Gunivere Barlow (Carmichael

Watson Project, GB)

Small Scale, Big Change – the impact of social media

Working within a small team, with limited resources, it is often all too easy for staff to focus on the

job in hand, achieving results but failing to publicise them. The introduction of Web 2.0 technologies

into the working practices of small scale, specialist archives has transformed this, enabling easier

promotion, developing wider networks and adding value and expertise.

Within the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections there are a number of specialist

archives, run either as part of our core services or as one-off projects. Two of these, the Lothian

Health Services Archive and the Carmichael Watson Project will discuss the techniques that they have

used and the impact that these have had, both in terms of raising awareness and how this has

changed they work and the people they work with.

For Lothian Health Services Archive, the use of social media has not only built new audiences, but

also lasting partnerships with other archives, organisations and individuals. Through a crowd sourcing

initiative, the Carmichael Watson Project has 'mapped' real world, contextual links onto the archive

of nineteenth century folklorist, Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912)."

Doreen Kelimes (City Archives Speyer, DE)

The eastern and north-eastern European archives between digitisation, Web 2.0 and

social media

The transformation process in the late 1980s in Eastern Europe not only led to an opening of the

borders, but also improved the gradual access to the archives in the eastern and north-eastern

European countries. Besides that, a new phenomenon has been enriched the world: the invention of

the World Wide Web.

Today Web 2.0 and the social media open a new spectrum of public relations to the cultural

institutions. This is a new possibility to communicate with the user. Many cultural institutions seize

the opportunity to present their collections digitally and carry out more and more projects.

Especially the first projects based on the digitisation, for example the register of births, deaths and

marriages and the church records. The digitisation is also an opportunity to protect and to preserve

the cultural assets.

This new form of public relations with Web 2.0 and the social media give the institutions the chance

to present themselves nationally and internationally with the whole of their archival repertoire. This

overview presents a resume of the work of the archives in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland and

their Web 2.0 activities.

Alexander Schatek (Topothek, AT)

“Let the crowd work”. Creating a Virtual Archive by Local Units

What about historic material and historic knowledge besides Archives? How to mobilise it? How to

file and make the vast amount of content accessible?

The answer is the local people themselves: persons interested in the history of their hometown and

working voluntarily. To encourage them to work means to invite them, structure their commitment

by giving them clear guidelines, tools to work with, a society for back up and, after all, appreciation:

So the task is building up an organisation.

The volunteers may work in workgroups, either gathered in a workspace or alone at home, but cross-

linked with their colleagues. As soon as the structures of work are visible, there may be the invitation

to a wider public: If real crowd sourcing or not is an exciting question! Probably with a core team

established, they may supervise the incoming content cumulated by the crowds’ help.

The incoming data has to be examined using scientific aspects by scientific forces: To find content

with supra-regional importance and to improve quality of tagging.

One side of the New Partnership is thus identified. But who is the other? The local governments, the

governments on a national, even European level to donate structures? Or will there be no

partnership at all, with the people working in open source structures that will generate a standard?

Peter Moser (Archives of Rural History, CH)

Virtual archives: a new solution to old problems?

In many European countries whole sections of the civil society have no archival institution of their

own. Since public archives are seldom in a position to acquire, catalogue and make accessible the

relevant archival material of these sectors (education, health, agriculture etc.), their history relevant

records are in danger of being lost beyond recall.

As an alternative to the costly (and, therefore, unrealistic) establishment of specific archives,

historians and archivists in Bern have established the virtual Archives of Rural History (ARH). The ARH

has safeguarded collections from 170 institutions and individuals to the extent of more than 1’500

linear meters archival material (incl. photographs and films) since its foundation in 2002. As virtual

archives, the ARH do not store the catalogued archival records themselves, but deposit them in

already existing public archives or, alternatively, they are kept, after being catalogued, by the owner-

creators themselves. In either case, the records are accessible to researchers for scientific purposes.

Each collection is provided with its own catalogue or finding aid that functions as a key to identifying

the individual items contained in the files of the collection. All catalogues are accessible online via

the database ‘Records of Rural History’ (www.agrararchiv.ch).

This presentation will address three main points:

a) the concept of virtual archives exemplified on the ARH,

b) the relationship of virtual archives with the existing, non-virtual archives and

c) the potential and limits of the concept of virtual archives in the sense of the ARH.

Tom Cobbaert (Archief 2.0, BE)

ArchiefWiki, the collaborative success of independent knowledge sharing

ArchiefWiki (www.archiefwiki.org), Dutch for Archives Wiki, is an initiative by the Dutch-Flemish

online community Archief 2.0 (www.archief20.org). Founded in 2007 it aims to digitise Dutch

reference works into open content for archivists and archives users. By developing a digital point of

reference the founders and collaborators want to bring new life and update these "classics". Besides

that it wants to promote the use of wikis as a tool in the archives sector.

Since its foundation the wiki hosted two major projects: one bringing together all Dutch archival

terminology, found in historical and present day lexicons, as well in standards or archival laws; the

other creating a map and detailed guide to all archives in the Netherlands. The data of the latter is

currently made semantic and available for re-use, for example by APEx.

Beside those two projects archivists use the wiki to collaborate on projects, standards and

translations of ICA texts.

The presentation examines the advantages and disadvantages of using a wiki in collaboration

between archivists.

Session 1.6

Archival content in didactic practice

Antonella Ambrosio (UNINA – Università degli Studi di NapoliFederico II, IT)

Charters and digital archives in the didactic practice

The use of Virtual Libraries to read texts online, digital environments for distance learning and

teaching, social networks for sharing and discussing resources – these are only a few of the many

possibilities which change the profession of teaching and its didactic methods. This applies also to

the historical disciplines where the massive presence of archives of digitised charters changes rapidly

the teaching experience.

The learning environments designed with digital technologies and the portals providing digitised

charters have certainly proved to be efficient and, at the same time, to be in accordance to the

psycho-pedagogic approach of constructivism. They offer broader possibilities of source retrieval,

access to different points of view and unusual space for confrontation and reflection. Nevertheless,

they manifest a set of problems which risks becoming significant especially with regards to e-

learning. For example, today it is indispensable to reflect on the methodology for teaching students

the know-how to navigate the virtual universe of historical charters and on the promotional

strategies for a correct understanding of the discipline in a de-contextualised milieu as the digital

one.

This keynote intends to present the achievements, the trouble spots and the prospective solutions

with regard to the teaching methods for those historical disciplines using archival content, so as to

present the contributions of the conference session 3.3 and to emphasize the potentialities of the

Archival Portal Europe in this field.

Hrvoje Stančić, Arian Rajh, Edvin Bursić (Department of

Information and Communication Sciences, Faculty of

Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, HR)

Archival education activities in the online environment

The authors investigate if and how modern archives are using online environment for raising the

awareness of the importance of archival materials they preserve by creating online educational

content. Firstly, they explore content of different archival institutions and detect what online

educational activities they offer. They examine content on the web and on the social networks. The

authors then analyse the structure of detected online archival educational content, classify the

content according to the type of didactic materials, explore various didactic solutions and evaluate

level of the interdisciplinary approach. They also examine if and how interactive and multimedia

solutions are used for educational purposes. Further, the authors compare and analyse the quality

and innovativeness of online archival educational content. Based on the analytic approach, finally

they offer a vision of future development of archival educational activities in the online environment

Maria Gussarson Wijk (APEx, Swedish National Archives, SE)

The Archives Portal Europe and its possible uses in the upper secondary school: the

Swedish Global college example

In 2011 The Swedish parliament approved of a new education plan for upper secondary schools. In it,

the importance of learning how to work with historical sources was emphasised. This has been

received with mixed feelings within the teachers’ corps, but unquestionably, the archives have seen a

growing interest in the use of their fonds for educational purposes. Two further objectives set in the

plan are that students should learn how to use and benefit from new digital technology and also

learn about the European Union and its importance to Sweden. The emphasis on historical sources,

digital technology and the European Union suggests that the Archives Portal Europe could be

regarded as a relevant and interesting pedagogical means for historical studies at this level.

So how could upper secondary schools use the digital possibilities for archival studies provided by the

Archives Portal Europe? And what are the limitations? Could anything be done to improve its

potential usefulness for this user-group, or even create new uses? The following presentation will

discuss these questions departing from the Global College, an upper secondary school in Stockholm,

Sweden.

Artur Dirmeier & Kathrin Pindl (Spitalarchiv Regensburg, DE)

Spitalarchiv: didactic practice in a digital world

Can a small archive prevail academically in a digital world? Regensburg´s Spitalarchiv serves – for

better or worse – as a benchmark for the implementation of innovative didactic practice in an

archival environment.

With its history of 800 years and its over 5.000 charters, 4.500 books of accounts, its chronicles, files,

maps and pictures, the small but momentous Spitalarchiv holds more than a few high-profile

resources for regional and international scholars and is gradually opening up for digitization and web

2.0.

Our paper thoroughly discusses collaboration between the Spitalarchiv and the University of

Regensburg as well as it presents a number of courses – for (under-) graduate, further education plus

senior classes - under the aspects of best practice and evaluation. How to build network structures

within the academic world and beyond? How to detect worthwhile didactic strategies? How to

include online resources in teaching? How to recruit young academics for content-related research?

By applying statistical methods amongst others, we analyze various didactic concepts from

paleography exercises using digitized records to one “Spital App” project, thus providing valuable

experience for fellow institutions.

Session 2.1

Archival metadata and standards for digital archives

Daniel Pitti (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities,

University of Virginia, US)

The emerging archival metadata landscape

The release of the International Council on Archives (ICA) International Standard Archival

Description–General (ISAD(G)) in 1993 signalled emerging professional interest and appreciation for

the importance of standards, and evidence of an emerging international professional identity

founded on them: shared principles and the foundation for common practice. This trend continued

with the release of three additional ICA standards and revisions of two of them, and the

development of EAD and EAC-CPF. Since 1993, the cultural heritage standards landscape and

emergent technologies, in particular semantic technologies, have presented unprecedented

opportunities for cooperatively enhancing and integrating access to cultural heritage resources,

including archival resources. In order to effectively address these opportunities, ICA has appointed an

Experts Group on Archival Description mandated to develop a conceptual model for archival

description by 2016.

Karin Bredenberg (National Archives of Sweden, SE)

Record creators: use of EAC-CPF in the Archives Portal Europe

The APEnet project successfully established a common profile for the use of the international

archival standard EAD (Encoded Archival Description) within the Archives Portal Europe network as a

basis for central conversion, validation, indexing and presentation facilities.

Work Package 4 of the APEx project has been with continuing this work by advancing the Archives

Portal Europe specific standards & guidelines. As part of this work, Work Package 4 has been

adapting EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context – Corporate Bodies, Person, Families) by establishing a

profile for the use of this standard in the Archives Portal Europe. This presentation will focus on three

aspects of the work of WP4. These are:

- The benefits of using EAC-CPF within the Archives Portal Europe - The work completed so far by WP4 in adapting and developing apeEAC-CPF for the Archives

Portal Europe - The implementation of the standard within the Archives Portal Europe.

Kerstin Arnold (Technical Coordinator APEx, Federal Archives of Germany, DE)

EAD revision and its effects on the Archives Portal Europe

The Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is currently being revised and it is planned that the new

version is released by the end of 2013. With the APEx team being represented by several of its team

members in the Technical Subcommittee on EAD (TS-EAD) as well as the Schema Development Team

(SDT) at the Society of American Archivists (SAA), the project has been able to follow the discussions

so far, rather closely. By the 1st of May 2013 the commenting period for the alpha schema of the new

EAD will have been completed and so the APEx Conference in Dublin will provide a good forum to

present and possibly discuss some of the major changes that are to be expected.

As for the Archives Portal Europe and the implementation of EAD within its tools (based on the

profile for apeEAD), there will be various aspects to be taken into account ranging from content

display via search facilities and data preparation processes to data management and interoperability

tasks.

Maud Medves (CENDARI project, DE)

EAG CENDARI: customising EAG for research purposes

CENDARI aims at building a virtual research environment integrating digital resources for research on

medieval and modern European history. The emphasis is on being an infrastructure of research

(rather than for research) with a focus on end-users: historians.

In this respect EAG CENDARI acts as an interface between two spheres, the archives’ world and the

research world. It reflects the different objectives of these two communities in terms of sustainability

and coverage on the one side, and in terms of precision and search for specific items on the other. If

exhaustiveness is central for archives, it is not as crucial for the researchers and this observation led

to an EAG customisation that favours deepness instead of wide coverage. This impacted both the

workflow and the schema.

The workflow was defined to involve as much as possible the researchers in the definition of the

customisation. All major steps (functions and tools) were considered in this way: edition (xml editor,

ODD specification1), versioning (Subversion), identification, preservation and visualisation (XTF2).

1 See http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/future-developments-for-tei-odd/ 2 http://xtf.cdlib.org/

The schema also reflects the researcher’s perspective, particularly the very reduced set of elements

and the importance of sourcing and referencing mechanisms.

Session 2.2

Best practice: it’s tool time!

Susanne Waidmann (Federal Archives of Germany, DE)

The Archives Portal Europe: the adventure of presenting multicultural and multilingual

information on archival material, its creators and their repositories in just one tool

The Archives Portal Europe (www.archivesportaleurope.net) is the main visible product of the APEx

project. The users can access several types of “archival” information:

- on archival material based on EAD, used in the Archives Portal Europe as apeEAD, developed

in the APEnet project and further refined in the APEx project;

- on archival repositories based on EAG 2012, which is the new version of EAG 0.2 developed

in the APEx project in the 2012

and in 2014

- on creators of the archival information, based on EAC-CPF that will be used in the Archives

Portal Europe as apeEAC-CPF.

The search functionalities and result presentations – already implemented and planned – will be

presented combined with a closer look on some aspects of how the standards are used in the portal

and of the multilingual services we can already offer.

Bastiaan Verhoef (APEx, Nationaal Archief, NL)

The backend of the Archives Portal Europe: lessons learned and challenges waiting

(provisional)

There are two main backend tools of the Archives Portal Europe: the Data Preparation Tool (DPT) and

the dashboard.

The DPT is a stand-alone tool which allows content providers to undertake the most time and

resource consuming actions locally and leave only secondary tasks for the online environment. The

most crucial functionalities of the DPT are the batch conversion and validation of data extracted from

content providers’ archival systems into the formats supported by the Archives Portal Europe.

The dashboard is the central point of data upload to the Archives Portal Europe and further delivery

of data to Europeana. It serves three types of user groups: the central administrators that are

creating new users and managing their actions; the Country Managers that are coordinating the

participating archival institutions in their respective countries; and the institution managers that are

uploading and managing the data of their institutions.

The main functionalities of these tools will be presented, furthermore some aspects of the

technology behind these tools and the tasks to be realised in the further project phases.

Jochen Graf (University of Cologne, DE)

Transcription, contextualization and peer review: the ‘Monasterium Collaborative

Archives’

The Monasterium Collaborative Archive (MOMCA) was originally designed to serve as the

presentation and Wiki platform for the digitised medieval charters of the European Monasterium

Community. For some years the MOMCA platform now has further been used and developed by

other archival projects, for example by the Virtual German Charter Network and by Itinera Nova.

Within such cooperation projects the MOMCA software turned into a more general archival

software framework not only useful for medieval charters but also for different kinds of archival

sources and also for quite different user communities. The presentation will deliver insight into three

collaborative systems which are part of the Monasterium software: the Import Environment for the

webbased and automatic upload of archival charter collections into the Monasterium database, the

easy to use Transcription Tools of Itinera Nova and the newly developed Collection Environment,

which allows users to create and publish their own charter collections in a Google Drivelike

environment. All these platforms and tools rely on open metadata standards. Also, the quality of

published content is generally ensured by peer review mechanisms. Therefore, the presentation will

point out that the aforesaid ‘Monasterium Collaborative Archives’ could be seen as potential content

providers for Archive Portals Europe.

Eoghan Ó Carragáin (National Library of Ireland, IE), Luke O'Sullivan (Swansea

Univesity Library, IE)

Archival collections in Vufind

Originally “designed and developed for libraries by libraries”, the open-source Vufind project has

matured into a flexible discovery interface capable of indexing and presenting all sorts of data from a

wide variety of systems. Recently, developers from the National Library of Ireland, Swansea

University, Villanova University, and the National Library of Finland collaborated to enhance how

Vufind handles hierarchical collections such as those found in archival management systems and

digital repositories. With the release of version 1.4 in January 2013, Vufind now has built-in support

for the display of complex hierarchies, and tools are available to help with indexing different data-

sources, including EAD.

This paper will outline some of the motivations for incorporating archival collections into Vufind and

the challenges encountered. We will demo the new archival features and review some of the

technical and design choices made by Vufind developers. Finally, we will discuss how other

institutions may avail of Vufind to bring their archives to the web, especially those that need to

present archival records alongside data from other sources.

Session 2.3

Best practice: from cardboard boxes to European e-archives

Zoltán Szatucsek (National Archives of Hungary, HU)

Search all, find more: access to the Archival Database Service in Hungary

The DatabasesOnline project of the National Archives of Hungary started in 2010 when the growing

amount of digital content led to both technical and intellectual insustainability.

The consolidation involved the two major challenges of standardization and secure archiving, while

the most attractive outcome was online access. Federated and field search provide flexible search

options for 27 databases of medieval parchments, conscriptions, birth registers and modern records.

The paper focuses on the new development cycle, closed this March with the release of 1.3 version.

Beside new features, the main purpose was to react to the integration of 20 regional archives into

the NAH organization, bringing 158 new datasets into the system. Since then with its wealth and

unique content DatabasesOnline became the largest archival service in Hungary. The presentation

shows how the APEX partner NAH exploited the experiences of the international archival community

and how we use this service to provide data for APE. The final section of the paper deals with user

acceptance. Google Analytics and Search Field Analytics tools are used for planning further

development according to users' requests.

Maria Popkovacheva-Terzieva (Archives State Agency of Bulgaria, BG)

Archives State Agency: attempts to popularize its digital holdings

I. The initial question for the Bulgarian archives is who the end-users of our archival heritage

are.

Scholars, academic, scientists, students, in brief all those who work in academia and do

research use the archives anyhow, they are familiar visitors of our reading rooms.

However, it seems to us, equally important, if not more important, to bridge the gap

between the archives and the non-expert user, the one who does not spend much time on

academic work and is generally unaware of what the archives stand for and what materials

they contain. The general public holds a large diversity of interests and views, and so the

archives have to be creative in devising ways with which to capture their attention and even

spur their curiosity to explore on their own what the archives hold. Creativity and modern-

speak is vital, especially when we keep in mind the plethora of information channels that

currently saturate the public space.

II. A way to go about achieving this is to adequately select what to digitise according to set

criteria. Currently, the Bulgarian Archives hold about 100 linear kilometres of documents. It is

neither possible given our current capabilities, nor necessary, for us to digitise all records

that we preserve – some sort of a minimal description of what we hold will suffice. Hence,

similar to the policy of all other archives, for enriching our digital archive we proceed by

digitising the documents that merit the greatest interest of the non-expert users and are

especially unique and valuable.

III. This year so far we have completed the digitisation of three collections for a total of 200 000

digital images

IV. Protocols and Decisions of the former Bulgarian Communist Party

V. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Balkan Wars we digitised lists that contain the

names of the 48 000 soldiers, who died. This was done in order to commemorate not only

large scale events, but the ordinary nameless heroes of the wars. On the site, we have

provided general information and pictures of the war, but the list with the three names of

the soldiers searchable by a variety of indicators is crucial. In this way, we believe, textbook

information regarding the wars is deepened through personal and familial history. In order to

further stimulate engagement with this type of history, the site also allows the users to

digitise and submit digital material about the war.

VI. Our third collection is made up of around 8000 digital images of some of the more interesting

Police Files of Famous Persons from before 1944.

VII. These three collections have been quite a success because:

a. They prescribe a certain move from national to family history - we received quite a

few letters, stating the gratitude and the pleasant experiences of the users working

with the sites

b. We have had numerous visits and media publications regarding the collections

VIII) With this in mind, we move onto a discussion of supply-side motivation – in other words does

the Bulgarian archive have an agenda for digitisation? What are the current goals that the

archives are trying to fulfil when reaching out to the non-expert user?

1) We would like to gain visibility and highlight the importance of the archives for the

functioning of the modern nation-state. In proceeding forward, individuals,

institutions and states work within an inherited framework and contours set out by

the political economic and cultural developments that preceded them. In that sense,

we believe that an important objective of the archives is to emphasise the

importance of knowing the past and of being aware of it, to give rise to a certain

sense of historicity.

2) Another objective of the archives is to become a player in the education arena.

Documents contain a raw, unmediated truth that can lead to the solution of many

disagreements or the fostering of agreements, once one knows how to use them.

Working with primary sources has an intrinsic value and the archives are trying to

cultivate it. The archives contain materials for what seems like an infinite number of

topics and we can provide expertise on numerous subjects once we have earned and

been granted a place at the table.

3) The third objective is to raise the national conscience not in terms of some

headstrong adherence to national symbols and rhetoric, but in terms of a sense of

belonging to a community of citizens. Hence, we have resorted to various means and

initiatives that help us reach out to the general non-expert user in a modern, even

entertaining, way.

IX) This year, we have a new web-site – it actually won an award for the best State Administration

web-site of the Year 2012. The web-site gives access to our digital archive – it contains finding

aids and thematic collections. Other initiatives that further enhance our commitment in this

area include:

- Facebook – during the past year, 700 new users have signed up to our page; a new

“Document of the week” can now be found on our page.

- Wikipedia – inspired by the experience of the US archives, we launched a

cooperation project with Wikipedia. Wikipedians receive help from archivists in

searching records and information with which to deepen and enlarge their articles.

We see our efforts in this area as enhancing the global spread of knowledge since so

many people use Wikipedia.

- Working on a Crowd-sourcing Initiative

X) International Projects

1) APEX – we are a content-provider in the Archival Portal Europe where we plan to

contribute to the portal our finding aids, our Politburo Protocols, a topic relevant to

current political affairs, and images of some of our most important masterpieces

2) World War I – we have organised an initiative via ICARUS that plans to digitise

documents on WWI and show how the wars affected the ordinary people, the women,

the children, etc. We are planning to use a variety of ways through which to exhibit the

materials amongst which a web-site and a digital exhibition. We will know if we receive

funding for this project early next year.

3) Visual Archive of South-Eastern Europe, which is to be launched in the fall of 2013 is

meant to show the daily lives of European cities in the beginning of the 20th century

through the photography of a famous Bulgarian family – Karastoyanovi.

4) Finally, top-notch among our efforts to popularize the Bulgarian digital archival heritage

is an aggressive media campaign which currently sees us cooperating with all major

media.

XI) Finally I would like to address some areas in which we think we can improve our efforts to

popularise our digital holdings.

- We believe that the educational arena is where we can further strengthen our input. We

believe we are lagging in Europeana mainly because there is a lack of national financing for

digitisation and this is because digitisation is not seen as a priority.

-

Peter Fleer (Swiss Federal Archives, CH)

Interpretation of digital records

Contrary to analogue documents, which ordinarily serve as their own user interface, digital

documents cannot be read instantaneously. They require software programmes to be displayed and

interpreted, which become, therefore, part of the auxiliary sciences of history of the 21st century.

According to Bruno Latour, the drawing together and the mobilization of inscriptions (documents,

data etc.) are the most important elements of the production of knowledge. As a result, “classical

archives” are inextricably linked with the scientific production of new knowledge through the

archiving of digital documents. These facts have to be taken into consideration when developing

infrastructure for archives in the digital age.

The presentation focuses on three dimensions of turning digital information into knowledge. Firstly,

it provides insight into the experiences archives made with the interpretation of digital records,

secondly, it explores the recent practices and tendencies of interpreting digital documents within

Digital Humanities (data mining, distant reading, crowd sourcing, thick mapping etc.), and, thirdly, it

discusses the actual and future requirements within the humanities and the social sciences

concerning the elaborate exploitation of digital archival data. Against this backdrop, the presentation

evaluates the possibilities of the Swiss Federal Archives of making available concrete tools to

researchers.

John Cox (National University of Ireland, IE)

The Abbey Theatre Archive Digitization Project:

challenges and opportunities

National University of Ireland, Galway, and the Abbey Theatre entered in 2012 a partnership to

digitise the archive of the Abbey Theatre (http://www.nuigalway.ie/abbey-digital-archive-

partnership/). This is the largest theatre archive digitisation ever undertaken, and will open up a new

era of scholarship for Irish theatre internationally. The Abbey Theatre holds one of the world’s most

significant archival collections, running to almost 2 million pages. The digitisation process is in

progress on the NUI Galway campus in the James Hardiman Library.

Managing the digitisation project presents a range of challenges, including the scale of the operation,

the diversity of formats and media, development of optimal workflows and technologies for speed of

throughout, quality control, restricted access materials and digital rights management. There are also

very exciting opportunities in terms of developing partnerships with academic communities, placing

archives at the centre of a major digital humanities initiative. This project has the potential to

redefine the nature of research into the history of Irish drama and Irish writing and to develop new

roles for archivists.

The proposed paper will outline the challenges and opportunities arising from the Abbey Theatre

Archive Digitisation Project and their wider significance for digital archives.

Grace Toland (Irish Traditional Music Archive, IE)

The Irish Traditional Music Archive & The Inishowen Song Project

In 2008 the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) began publishing digitised materials on its website.

Digitisation and web publishing provide the archive with a means of giving world wide access to a

selection of its extensive sound, print, video, still image & manuscript collections.

To-date the ITMA Digital Library contains 3,839 digital items – sound, print, images, videos &

interactive music scores - with accompanying metadata, PDFs (where possible) and brief contextual

essays. ITMA’s digital metadata is harvested regularly by Europeana and made available via the

europeana.eu portal

In 2011, a local Donegal development organisation, the Inishowen Traditional Singers’ Circle (ITSC)

approached ITMA with a proposal to use its Digital Library to host local audio & video field recordings

of traditional singers and accompanying material. With Leader funding The Inishowen Song Project

(ISP) was completed in March 2013. The ISP microsite now gives free searchable access to 524 audio

recordings, 75 videos; images/info on 157 singers and downloadable PDFs of 599 songs.

My presentation will give:

- Overview of ITMA’s Digital Library

- Case study on the Inishowen Song Project – its structure, content & potential as a resource

locally & internationally. The presentation will give the opportunity to hear and see Irish

traditional singers from Donegal

Session 2.4

Best practice: sustaining digital infrastructures in the long

run

Hrvoje Stančić, Arian Rajh (Department of Information

and Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and

Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, HR), Edvin Buršić

(Financial Agency, HR)

Using Archival Information Packages for production of sustainable

archival collections of digitised records

The authors investigate the ways of creation of Archival Information Packages (AIPs) based on ISO

14721:2012 and the benefits of AIPs for sustainable preservation of digitised materials. They use the

example of large scale digitisation (more than 8M images) of analogue medicinal product

documentation, consisting of applications submitted by medicinal products’ marketing authorisation

holders (dossiers) and other documentation created by national competent authority in regulatory

processes, which are being structured as AIP for importing in an enterprise content management

system. Digital packages consist of ISO 19005 compatible content files (searchable PDF/A) and XML

index files consisting of 45 metadata elements. Index files are being created by using structured

metadata schemes extracted from various databases (archival database and main business registry)

and semi automatically edited. Based on the research analysis the authors offer a general scenario

for preparing digitised materials for long term preservation.

Giovanni Ciccaglioni (ICUU – Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, IT)

Digital cultural heritage and e-infrastructures

The DCH-RP Project: Towards an Open Science Infrastructures for Digital Cultural Heritage in 2020

DCH-RP Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation is a coordination action led by the Italian

Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities – ICCU, supported by EC FP7 e-Infrastructures

Programme, and launched to look at best practice for preservation standards in use (www.dch-

rp.eu/).

It started in October 2012 and builds upon the knowledge generated by the DC-NET ERA-NET and the

INDICATE, two pioneer projects for Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) e-infrastructures where many of

the DCH-RP partners participate. The consortium involves 13 partners from EU countries, Cultural

Institutions and e-Infrastructures Providers, and will move to external partners from Europe and

other countries.

The project aims to harmonise data storage and preservation policies in the digital cultural heritage

sector; to progress a dialogue and integration among institutions, e-Infrastructures, research and

private organisations; to identify models for the governance, sustainability and maintenance of the

integrated infrastructure for digital preservation of cultural content. DCH-RP is not dealing with the

actual digitisation process, nor with the developments of advanced access and interaction

technologies, which are covered by national and regional programs and ICT R&D initiatives

respectively.

The main outcome of the project is to validate a roadmap for the implementation of preservation e-

infrastructures for Digital Cultural Heritage. The consortium is organising a number of Proof of

Concepts, where cultural institutions and e-infrastructure providers will experiment with the actual

use of grid and cloud services to store digital culture resources i. e. digital assets (data plus metadata)

produced by institutions involved in the various field of Cultural Heritage, archives, libraries,

museums.

DCH-RP has an impact on different areas: on European and national CH programmes, on CH

institutions, experts and professionals, on e-Infrastructures and on the general public. It is targeting

three main types of user communities, namely, content providers, policy makers and program

owners, end users accessing the resulting DCH infrastructures to access data that content providers

make available for subsequent research. In this way DCH-RP is establishing collaborative links with

the DCH community to give information on the project and, above all, on the use of e-Infrastructures

for the long and short term preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage.

Salvatore Vasallo (Instituti Centrale per gli Archivi, IT)

The Archival Resource Catalogue within the Italian National Archival System

The Italian archival organisation is diversified and complex. The state archives alone represent a

scattered network of 103 archival institutions. In addition, there are the archives of municipalities,

provinces, regions and many other public institutions, as well as private archives.

The Catalogo delle Risorse archivistiche (Archival Resource Catalog) or CAT, within the Sistema

Archivistico Nazionale (Italian National Archival System) or SAN, is an aggregator of information and

digital reproductions, coming from all this variety of sources.

The presentation will describe the architecture and the data model of the CAT and the import and

update procedures of the archival data and the digital objects that are managed through the

combination of EAD, EAC-CPF, METS schemas.

Both manual import and data harvesting based on the OAI-PMH protocol are used for populating the

system. The data is then processed through a dashboard (Ontoir), meant to validate the files and also

verify the integrity of the relationships between the entity described (archival aggregations, creators,

custodians, finding aids, digital objects).

The presentation will depict also some of the challenges generated by such an approach, along with

some of the alternative solutions to be experimented in the future for enhancing the access and data

sharing as, for example, the use of linked data or alternatives based on an approach borrowed by

Distributed Concurrent Versions System (DVCS).

Armin Straube (German National Library, DE)

Frameworks for digital preservation

Building and maintaining trusted digital repositories is a major task for archives in the digital world.

Since 2004, nestor, the German network for digital preservation supports cultural heritage

institutions embarking on this endeavour. Now, standards and recommendations for the

preservation of images and textual media are in place. The work on technical aspects goes on, nestor

working groups are looking into the preservation of websites, software and audiovisual media.

The key challenge for cultural heritage institutions however, is to build a sustainable institutional

framework for digital preservation. In 2013 nestor working groups will publish guides on cost

calculation and on drafting institutional policies.

A new nestor service is the certification of digital repositories in the form of an extended self-

evaluation. The process is designed to check and improve existing digital repositories. The criteria

catalogue is based on DIN 31644 and is available in both German and English.

Session 2.5

Best practice: building infrastructures on a national level

Vlatka Lemić (Croatian State Archives, HR)

Tba

Christina Wolf & Gerald Maier (State Archives Baden-Württemberg, DE)

Building a German archives portal: development of a national platform for archival

information within the German Digital Library

Presenting archival material on the internet is an important way for archives to gain attention in the

digital age. One central portal which offers access to all kinds of archival content from various

archives can bring a significant added value to both users and institutions. A major step towards this

direction is the development of a German Archives Portal (Archivportal-D) 3, a platform for which

archives situated in Germany can provide information and which aims at becoming the central access

point for users interested in archival material.

The German Archives Portal is being built as a specific view on the German Digital Library (Deutsche

Digitale Bibliothek, DDB)4, the central, overall platform for cultural and scientific information from

libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutions in Germany and national

aggregator for Europeana. The German Archives Portal will offer access to archival content within the

DDB in a way that refers to the particular requirements for a professional presentation and research

concerning archival material. The German Research Foundation funds its realisation within a project

which started in autumn 2012. It is carried out by the State Archives of Baden-Wuerttemberg, FIZ

Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and other skilled archival institutions.

Thanks to the planned development of interfaces to other archival information systems like the

Archives Portal Europe, the German Archives Portal will be connected with and integrated into the

world of digital archival services.

This presentation will give an insight into the activities and prospects of the German Archives Portal

and the German Digital Library, also addressing the definition of a standard for data delivery based

on EAD.

3 www.archivportal-d.de (in German). 4 www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de.

István Kenyeres (Budapest City Archives, HU)

Archives Portal Hungary: asolution for joint publication of databases and digitized

archival materials

The creation of the Archives Portal Hungary (APH) (www.archivportal.hu) was supported by the

Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture in 2009. The Ministry charged the Budapest City

Archives with the realisation of the project. The portal provides access to up-to-date information on

both archival material and archival institutions to visitors and publishes a joint database integrating

23 Hungarian archival institutions. These are represented on the portal through parts of their archival

material (maps, documents, files etc.) available for online search. The presentation focuses on one

specific function of the portal: the Joint Archival Database. The aim of the project was not to create

new digital content, but to collate the available records of the collaborating institutions into one

system and to publish them online on the portal. At present APH contains more than 1,8 Million

records and 3 Million images of 10 different sub-databases with the same frame system:

1. Integrated Archival Database – which unifies descriptive records on highly

differing archival files and documents, many of them linked to digital images

2. Database of fonds and sub-fonds – basic information on the archival material

3. Cadastral maps of the counties – with georeferenced maps and an online

gazetteer database

4. Digitised documents of the Communist Party (searchable PDF format)

5. Archival publications (searchable PDF format)

6. Archontology and Name Directories.

Moreover, APH also provides access to 4 databases of the Hungarian National Archives (medieval

charters, plans, feudal conscription, royal books). Each of the sub-databases (integrated database,

fonds and subfonds, cadastral maps – settlements names, documents of the communist party,

archival publications, archontology and name directories) has its own search engine. The unified

search engine enables combined and easy search of the complete Joint Database with one click. The

presentation aims at addressing the methodological features of the project and the collaboration of

the archives represented in the portal.

Karol Krawczyk (Head Office of State Archives, PL)

Holdings accessible online: the Polish experience

The presentation will describe the following:

Archival Information Systems used by Polish archives to manage finding aids and their

presentation on the internet as well as experience of Polish archives in making available

digitised archival records on the internet.

The process which has already started of building single Integrated Archival Information

System for all the archives in Poland to manage all information about Polish archives'

holdings and to make it fully accessible online.

The internet portals which users can use for finding digitised archival records presently

available and to discuss the main portal www.szukajwarchiwach.pl which will be the place

from which all digitised archival records from all archival institutions in Poland will be

accessible.

The future plans for developing portal www.szukajwarchiwach.pl e.g. including Web 2.0

services and functionalities which meet the requirements of different groups of users.

The process of preparing and delivering Polish data to the Archive Portal Europe which we

used so far in APEnet project and the process which we shall be using in APEx project.

Chezkie Kasnett (The National Library of Israel, IL)

The historical archive reborn: approach and strategy

for the Archive network

The Israel Heritage Archive Network is a national cultural heritage project to include over 400

historical archives into an online public network.

Case: Many historical archives are unknown and inaccessible to the public and thus there exists a real

danger of losing historically valuable material.

Objectives:

a. A platform for archives to improve the quality of and access to their collections.

b. Provide public access to valuable national material c. Provide a framework and infrastructure

for long-term digital preservation of records and digital objects

Value:

a. Create shared controlled vocabularies.

b. Semantic processing of metadata and OCR.

c. Federated search

d. Achieve a range and depth of results never before possible.

Project challenges:

1. Archives

a. different/lack of standards of metadata

b. organisations vary greatly in both size and structure

c. poor physical state of archives and their holdings

d. hesitance of archives in participating

e. enormous quantity of data

2. Technology

a. difficulty in controlling and managing the information

b. long-term digital preservation

c. standardisation and unification of the data

d. creating a usable, intuitive, engaging website aimed at different user groups

3. The process

a. dealing with numerous languages in the data

b. creating multilingual website and application interfaces

c. working with many agents in the execution of the project

d. funding and bureaucracy

e. lack of standards and unified methodology.

Solution:

Core strategy factors:

1. Securing necessary funding.

2. Building a team of experts.

3. Creating a framework for Long-term Digital Preservation

4. Copyright and legal aspects

5. Employ standards.

6. Implement a KIS (Keep It Simple) approach.

7. Learn from other projects.

8. Involve the archives and the public.

9. Create a win-win situation for the maximal participation.

Session 2.6

Best practice: building infrastructures on an international

level

Manfred Thaller, Jochen Graf, Sebastian Rose, Andre Streicher (University of Cologne,

DE)

Network(s) for Europe’s charters: a proven blueprint for an international infrastructure

Since the beginning of the project in 2002 the site http://www.monasterium.net/ has developed into

one of the largest collaborations for medieval source material. It was started by Thomas Aigner of

the Episcopal archive at St. Pölten, originally to make the charters of monastic archives of Austria

available in digital form. In the meantime it has grown into an international effort bringing together

around 80 archives from a dozen European countries, carried onwards by the non-profit organization

http://www.icar-us.eu/. Between them, the archives have made ca. 250.000 medieval charters

available, all in the form of digital facsimiles, many of them connected to edited texts. The digital

environment contains a WYSIWIG XML editor for collaborative editing, graphical tools for

palaeography and various other components, including a tutorial system to teach the handling of the

online archive as well as diplomatic as such. This software environment has in the meantime

produced spin-off projects which deal with similar corpora elsewhere.

This presentation deals with the software side of the project, emphasising particularly the design

issues surrounding support for ten-language multilingualism.

Gerold Ritter & Jonas Arnold (Archives Online, CH)

Archives Online: real time searched in 13 archives without redundant data

The Project "Archives Online"

Since summer 2010 the trilingual archive portal "Archives Online" (www.archivesonline.org) provides

parallel full-text search in the databases of currently 13 affiliated archives. The search queries are

transmitted to the databases in real time as SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) requests. The databases

return their 50 most relevant hits containing 6 ISAD(G) data elements. The hits are aggregated and

displayed in Archives Online as a sortable link list and can be filtered by years and archives.

This approach allows fast distributed searches, avoids redundant data storage and data maintenance

and guarantees access to the most up-to-date data of every archive at very low maintenance costs.

The presentation by Dr. Gerold Ritter, director of "Archives Online" will present the portal and its

technical architecture. Jonas Arnold, head IT of the Archives of Contemporary History at the ETH

Zurich will describe the solution from the point of view of participating archives and of its end-users.

Henk Harmsen (DARIAH-EU)

DARIAH: the adventure of building an infrastructure

DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, aims to enhance and

support digitally enabled research and teaching across the humanities and arts. DARIAH will develop,

maintain and operate an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and support

researchers in using ICT-enabled methods to analyse and interpret digital resources.

DARIAH emerged as a Research Infrastructure on the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research

Infrastructures) Roadmap in 2006.

DARIAH is on its way to becoming a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). This

European legal entity will facilitate the long-term sustainability of DARIAH.

DARIAH is an integrating activity bringing together the state-of-the-art digital arts and humanities

activities of its member countries. DARIAH will operate through its European-wide network of Virtual

Competency Centres (VCCs). Each VCC is centred on a specific area of expertise. VCCs are cross-

disciplinary, multi-institutional and international:

• VCC e-Infrastructure will establish a shared technology platform for Arts and Humanities

research

• VCC Research and Education Liaison will expose and share researcher's knowledge,

methodologies and expertise

• VCC Scholarly Content Management will facilitate the exposure and sharing of scholarly

content (research data)

• VCC Advocacy, Impact and Outreach will interface with key influencers in and for the Arts and

Humanities

Anna Bohn & Aleksandra Pawłiczek (CENDARI project, DE)

CENDARI: building up a research infrastructure on The First World War across

borders

The memory of the First World War is saved in archival records in archives, museums and libraries

worldwide. As a result of war and political changes, many records have been lost, fragmented,

dispersed or relocated. CENDARI is building up an Archive Directory and Archival Research Guides to

give access to archival holdings relevant for the First World War and to create a linked data

environment for the eHumanities. The CENDARI digital infrastructure will enable source research,

gathering and linking information about archival material on the First World War in many different

institutions and countries. Special attention is given to East Europe and South East Europe and to

"hidden archives".

The transnational and interdisciplinary approach is promoted by linking multilingual source

material of different media types (written sources, moving images, images and sound) from

countries affected by the war. CENDARI also provides researchers with a virtual

infrastructure and with digital tools which allow users to generate content, annotations,

visualisations and customisations of their own research outcomes. To ensure partnership

with the research community, CENDARI cooperates with the project “1914-1918-online.

International Encyclopaedia of the First World War”.