What can I find in Archives Portal Europe?

Help Search & Find What can I find in Archives Portal Europe?

Archives Portal Europe holds the digital catalogues of archival institutions holding documents produced in the European continent, or related to European countries. It is open to any type of archival institution in the world: state archives, local archives, private archives, church archives, museum archives, university archives, thematic archives, business archives, and so on.

There are three types of information you can find on Archives Portal Europe:

  • Information about the archival institutions that collaborate with us (opening times, what they hold, how to contact them)
  • The digital catalogues of the institutions (holdings guides and finding aids) with different levels of details: from a generic description of a fond, down to a very thorough description of the single document
  • The link to the digitised documents, if these are available on the web.

If the documents from a specific collection found on Archives Portal Europe have been digitised, then they are linked to the website of the institution hosting the material. Archives Portal Europe is concerned with the archival descriptions: finding aids, source, and holding guides, other metadata that allow the archival material of a myriad of archives scattered around the world to be found with one search in the portal.

If the material is not digitised, Archives Portal Europe still allows you to know what is available and where on any given subject that you are searching, across thousands of institutions around the world; and it helps you to contact the single institution, or to enquire whether they do digitisation on demand.

There are three approaches to research in archives portal Europe: through the archival descriptions; through the descriptions of the records creators; and through the information on the institutions themselves. You can learn more in our Research Tools section.