Last 27 April Marta Musso, Research and Engagement Coordinator at Archives Portal Europe and post-doctoral fellow at King's College London, took part in the conference "An Archival Repository of Archival Repositories: integrating metadata in Archives Portal Europe" of the Digital History Seminars series.
The conference recording is now online on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kItyonMn2jo
In 2002, the guidelines created by the ICA (International Council on Archives) and IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) indicated full digitisation and online availability of archival material as the main objective for archives in the digital age. Since 2009, in parallel with the creation of national or local research portals, countries around Europe have started to design a system to integrate these online spaces into a single catalogue that would allow to access Europe’s archival heritage through one single research portal. In 2012, after three years of research, Archives Portal Europe (APE) was published as the online repository open to all institutions holding archival heritage about Europe. Marta Musso reconstructs the cultural and political background in which Archives Portal Europe was conceived and designed, and the issues (and solutions) offered to historians to conduct archival research online.