APE Digitisation Grants
The 2026 APE Digitisation Grant is out !!
This grant offers up to 10,000 EUR to archival institutions that want to add new collections to the Archives Portal Europe (APE), and/or improve collection descriptions already available in the portal, and/or add digital objects to collections available on APE (including the ingestion of new finding aids). The aim is to improve APE’s searchability, and to promote the open availability of digital collections on the web.
In 2026, alongside a new development that APE is currently working on to enable cross-institutional and cross-country search not only in archival descriptions, but also in digital representations of archival materials themselves, we are primarily looking for:
- Collections that will be digitised in combination with applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR);
- Collections that have been digitised already and to which OCR or HTR is to be applied now in a second step;
- Collections that have been digitised as well as OCR-ed/HTR-ed already, but for which descriptive metadata needs to be created and/or improved in order to be ready for online publication.
Eligibility
Current or prospective APE Content Providers from any country and any type of institution, as long as they have collections related to European history, or that were produced in Europe.
Becoming content providers for APE is completely free of charge, and only requires a few person-hours per month of work, respectively can be fully automated once a workflow has been established.
You can read about how to become Content Providers here: https://www.archivesportaleurope.net/about-us/join-us/?tab=content-provider
Scope
Ingestion of new materials in APE or improvement of collections already available in APE, with a focus on the provision of digitised as well as OCR-ed/HTR-ed records.
Applicants may apply for the Digitisation Grant to:
- Digitise new collections and apply OCR and/or HTR to these collections as part of the digitisation process;
- Apply OCR and/or HTR to collections that already were digitised previously;
- Create new archival descriptions to ingest the digitised and OCR-ed/HTR-ed collections in APE;
- Either by using an existing local software, provided the software allows for exports in the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard, another XML format, or CSV;
- Or by using an existing local software and developing a customised export from that software into EAD as used in APE (i.e. the apeEAD format);
- Or by transferring existing archival descriptions into a free software like AtoM (https://www.accesstomemory.org/en/) that would in turn allow an export in EAD;
- Or by making use of the web form and/or CSV upload and transformation offered by APE;
- Enhance and update existing archival descriptions for the digitised and OCR-ed/HTR-ed collections in order to ingest them in APE (e.g. adding normalised dates to the date of creation, ensuring that a minimum of information is available (title, id, date, content summary), adding subject headings or index terms, adding persistent identifiers, etc.);
- Either by using an existing local software, provided the software allows for exports in EAD, another XML format, or CSV;
- Or by using an existing local software and developing a customised export from that software into apeEAD format;
- Or by transferring existing archival descriptions into a free software like AtoM that would in turn allow an export in EAD;
- Or by making use of the web form and/or CSV upload and transformation offered by APE;
- Purchase of plug-ins, hardware, or software, to perform the actions needed. However, please note that APE actively discourages the usage of commercial software, so purchase of this kind needs to be motivated thoroughly in the application;
- Pay for person-hours to perform all the actions needed for the aforementioned goals.
Application
A one-page application which will ask the applicant to provide:
- Details of the institution, including annual turnover;
- General state of ingestion in APE and in Europeana (if applicable) and whether your country uses national, topic-based, or other aggregators;
- Scope of the digitisation / ingestion that the applicant intends to perform with the grant, including reasons why that selection was made (e.g., importance of the collections, or collections related to an anniversary coming up, etc.);
- Detailed budget, including how the calculation for person-hours was performed and the average salary in EUR for that position at the institution.
Max length of the application: 1,000 words, plus 500 words to detail the budget.
The application can be filled in English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian. The application must be filled online, at this link: https://forms.gle/WGEMiHh8iKKAKhqd8
Selection
The selection of one or more projects will be done by the Archives Portal Europe Foundation’s Governing Board, according to the relevance and scope of the collections presented for the grant, and the feasibility of the project within the given timeline.
Depending on the funds required for the projects applying to the grant, at least three projects will be selected.
Required outputs
- Ingestion or significant improvement/extension of at least one archival collection in APE that includes links digitised materials to which OCR and/or HTR have been applied;
- If a national-level aggregator is present, the material must also be made available in that aggregator’s context;
- Creation of a short report (up to 800 words) where the work done is laid out, including a description of the collections now available in APE.
The deadline for the application is Friday, 20 February 2026.
More information, including the link to examples of previous grant holders, can be found at this link: https://www.archivesportaleurope.net/tools/ape-grants/ape-digitisation-grants/
For any enquiry, please contact info@archivesportaleurope.net
Read the reports of the previous APE Digitisation Grants winners:
- The Military History Collection - Koç University Suna Kıraç Library (Report)
- The Titus Brandsma family archive (Report)
- The Oury Archive (Report)
- The National Archives of Latvia (Report)
- The National Bank of Greece (Report)
Pic: Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe, Beschreibung: Blick auf einen Arbeitsplatz im Olivetti-Terminalsystem mit einem Mitarbeiter und einer Mitarbeiterin (Description: View of a workplace in the Olivetti terminal system with one employee), 1975. Available here.
