Hi all,

Many of you will be aware of the Archives Hub, a service that aggregates descriptions from archives across the UK: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk.

We are happy to take in descriptions from all UK archives, and we aim to help you promote your collections, bringing in a larger audience, as well as making you a part of our Hub community. We provide your descriptions to the Archives Portal Europe. We provide information, help and advice to our contributors on cataloguing, data standards, interoperability and technical developments.

A few quotes from contributors:

"It's great having our descriptions on the Hub and now Archives Portal Europe - there's been an increased demand for the use of the archive throughout April and I'm sure having details of our archives in multiple places is a contributing factor.”
""We’ve been cataloguing our collections on Archives Hub for about two years now, and it has been absolutely brilliant – we’ve been able to get our collections “out there” and get people using them, plus the people at Archives Hub have been very helpful."

You can find out more at: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/whycontribute/

Many of our contributors use our EAD Editor which is a sophisticated cataloguing tool: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/eadeditor/. If this is of interest to you, please contact us. It is a form-based cataloguing interface including many innovations around things like data control, validation, preview, name lookup and and adding VIAF URLs for names. It can be used for simple collection descriptions through to complex multi-level descriptions.

We particularly wanted to draw your attention to our work with taking exports from archival management systems. This has been a long project, and it is open-ended, as variations in cataloguing practices mean that we have to address issues as we go. However, we do now have a ‘template’ to export from Calm, which many institutions have already used to provide their descriptions, we have just completed a template to export from AtoM, and we are working on one for AdLib. Other systems will follow…but it takes quite a bit of time and effort to develop these templates. We don’t just take in the data, we look for ways to make it more interoperable, ironing out inconsistencies so that it is more standardised and could potentially be used in various systems. This work means that we can add all descriptions to the Archives Portal Europe (http://http://www.archivesportaleurope.net). The benefits of working this way are that you keep the master copies - you do not have to create anything specifically for the Archives Hub. We simply take your descriptions and ingest them using a repeatable transformation process, so whenever you want to provide us with - revisions or new content - you can do. We will also give you access to an administrative area where you can un-publish content as and when you wish.

If you have one of these systems and would like to consider adding your descriptions to the Hub, then please get in touch - [log in to unmask]

Please note that we may not be able to upload your data instantly - it entirely depends upon the content. We do have mandatory fields and Hub requirements, and we will analyse your data and provide a report on what needs to be addressed. We may be able to address issues in our own processing - we always look for ways to improve our processing so that we transform data on ingest to create interoperable descriptions.

If you have a different system, then we would certainly be interested to hear from you - we aim to expand our processing over time. It is useful to know what is out there and what sort of processing we might need to develop.

with best wishes,
The Archives Hub Team

https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk

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