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Converting archival metadata to EDM

Converting archival metadata to EDM

Archives Portal Europe is the aggregator for the European archives community to Europeana, which collects and publishes digital objects and metadata from all kinds of European cultural heritage institutions (archives, audio-visual institutions, galleries, libraries, museums, etc.). In order to forward your data to Europeana, your institution should have signed Europeana's Data Exchange Agreement and you should be aware that this also means you will be sharing your metadata under the CC0 licence (Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication).

Furthermore, Europeana uses its own metadata model, the Europeana Data Model (EDM), so when forwarding content to Europeana via the Archives Portal Europe there are two things to be taken care of: first you should be able to select content which qualifies to be forwarded to Europeana, so those materials including links to digitised or born-digital content, and secondly, the metadata that is about these digital objects should be converted from apeEAD to EDM.

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Find content suitable for forwarding The EDM conversion form Delivery to Europeana EDM conversion details

apeEAD Categories

EAD 2002 EAD3 Converting archival metadata to EDM

Find content suitable for forwarding

In the Content manager screen you can easily recognise the finding aids that contain links to digital objects. Those are the finding aids which have No in black in the column EDM and No in black in the column Europeana, while the finding aids that have a grey "0" in the column EDM and a grey "No" in the column Europeana don't contain links to digital objects and hence are not available for forwarding. The two black No-s mean, that these finding aids contain links to digital objects, but they are not converted to EDM yet and are hence not forwarded to Europeana either.

When a finding aid has been converted to EDM, you will find two numbers in green in the column EDM (see more details about what these numbers mean further down below).

Next to this basic technical criterion, there are a few additional aspects you might want to consider when choosing material to share via Europeana:

While Europeana works on supporting all different types of materials, its approach is still more object-centric, which means that photograph, maps, or postcard collections along with audio and audiovisual content as well as shorter textual materials might be a better fit than archival records consisting of hundreds of (digitised) pages.
Your metadata and your digital objects will need to fulfil the requirements of the Europeana Publishing Framework. While Archives Portal Europe's EDM conversion can support you in the metadata aspects, the requirements for digital objects will have to be met by your institution.

The EDM conversion form

Once you have made your choice with regards to which content you would like to forward to Europeana, you can select the respective finding aids to be converted to EDM records, either via the batch function Convert to EDM or via the same function per finding aid in the Actions column. This will open a new screen, which allows you to provide some general settings for the EDM conversion and also asks you to confirm and/or provide some additional information that is required by Europeana. Apart from this, the apeEAD to EDM conversion runs automatically, quite similar to the conversion of your local data to apeEAD in the first place.

General settings

The general settings deal with identifiers and titles for each of the EDM records that the conversion will produce. For identifiers, you can choose between two places within your EAD finding aids, from where the conversion should take the information: either the record's <unitid>, which is the default setting as this will reflect the reference code used in other contexts, e.g. when users order an item from your archive, or the @id attribute of the single components (<c>) in your finding aid, which might include a unique and persistent identifier.

With regard to titles, there is one option referring to the title to be used within the EDM record representing the complete fonds or collection, which can be either the fonds' or collection's own title or the title of the finding aid describing it. In addition, there is an option referring to the titles of lower level components, that allows you to concatenate the titles of the two lowest levels, if useful in the context of a specific fonds or collection.

This relates to the fact that EDM is object-centric, i.e. it will not provide a similar hierarchical structure to EAD, but it will break the different hierarchical levels down into separate, singular records. Therefore the option to concatenate titles can be useful, if you e.g. have a collection of personal papers including correspondence, which is sorted by last name of the recipient and then by date. In such a case you might have a series with the title "Outgoing letters A to E", while each item, i.e. each letter, within this series has a title that only consists of the date of sending, e.g. "1 January 1905". If the digital object is now linked, as would be usual, to the single items, then the title included in the EDM record would only say "1 January 1905", which might not necessarily be that helpful to a user in itself. However, concatenated with the title of the next higher level, i.e. "Outgoing letters A to E, 1 January 1905", there's already a little more information available to a user, providing additional context for the object she/he/they are looking at.

Specific settings

The specific settings refer to aspects within the metadata that are required by Europeana and hence one needs to make sure that these are included in the EDM conversion results. These aspects are: the name of the data provider, i.e. your institution, the type of digital object, the language of the material and the language of the descriptions, i.e. the metadata, and the licensing information for the digital objects. All of these might already be in the metadata, which is why the conversion form offers the possibility to take this information from the apeEAD file that is to be converted, if available. Otherwise, the information given in the form will be used instead, i.e. you will always have to provide information for these five aspects to be on the safe side.

There are a few things to note with regard to these specific settings:

The type of object in the context of the EDM conversion refers to the type of digital file that represents the archival object. I.e. if you have an image file (a .png, .jpeg, .tiff), you should choose "Image" even if the object that has been digitised is textual or documentary material such as a letter, and if you have, for example, a PDF file, you should choose "Text", even if the object that has been digitised is a poster or a map. Similarly, you should make sure to choose "Text" when you have linked to a viewer of some kind, i.e. when your images are embedded in an HTML page, which will often come with the MIME type "text/html" independent from the type of material that has been digitised and can be seen in that viewer.
While you can choose several languages of the material, e.g. when you have a document in Russian that includes handwritten comments in Swedish, you will have to decide for only one language of the description. This due to the encoding of these two aspects in the EDM records; while the language of the material is encoded as an element (<dc:language>) and can hence be repeated, the language of description is added to other elements, e.g. the title or the description, as an attribute (@xml:lang) and can therefore only be used once. If, in the case of having more than one language of the material, you check the box "Same as for material" for the language of the description, the conversion will automatically assume the first of the named languages. In such a case it is hence recommended to uncheck the box "Same as for material" and to select the language of the description separately.
If you intend to use batch processing, you will need to make sure that these specific settings will be applicable in the same way to all the files included in your batch.

Once the right options, applicable to the content that has to be converted, have been chosen, clicking on the Convert button will start the actual apeEAD to EDM conversion process and EDM records will be produced for each digital object plus its accompanying metadata. You will thereby also return to the Content manager. After the apeEAD to EDM conversion process is completed, you will see how many EDM records ("Cultural heritage objects") were produced per finding aid in the EDM column of the Content Manager, and how many links to digital objects are included in these files overall ("Linked images"). Depending on whether your data includes a "1 to 1"- or a "1 to many"-relation between the archival object and its digital representation(s), the number of linked images might be the same or - significantly - higher as the number of cultural heritage objects.

Delivery to Europeana

Now you can start the actual delivery of your EDM records to Europeana. While there is an option to place your EDM records in the Archives Portal Europe's OAI-PMH repository for Europeana to come and fetch them, the delivery process now includes a few extra steps, which are followed through easier with a simple download of the converted EDM files and which require further interaction between the APEF team and Europeana's Data Publishing Services. You can either download your EDM records yourself and send them via email to the APEF staff or you can let us know which files are ready to be delivered and we will download the EDM records on your behalf.

The download will include a ZIP file with all EDM records for one finding aid. The APEF team will use this ZIP file in Europeana's Content Checker, the Metis Sandbox, which allows us to see if there'd be any issues when importing your data into Europeana. This provides a last checkpoint before the effective delivery and also comes with a preview option for you to check how your data will look like in Europeana. When everything goes well, the same ZIP file will then be submitted officially to Europeana's Data Publishing Services for processing. It will usually get scheduled into one of the team's sprints (2 to 3 weeks cycles) and the APEF team will be informed once the data has been published on Europeana. We will then provide you with a link to your data on Europeana's website to complete the sharing process.

EDM conversion details

As Europeana's focus is on digital cultural heritage objects, the EDM conversion will only include those parts of the EAD finding aids that link to digital archival objects. This means that any intermediate hierarchical levels, i.e. any descriptive level between the fonds or collection and the files or items linked to the digital archival objects, will be left out of the EDM conversion. This also means that any files and items that might not link to digital archival objects will be left out. Furthermore, the conversion will create a separate EDM XML file for each component that is linked to a digital archival object rather than keeping all in one XML file like in EAD. There will also be one EDM XML file representing the fonds or collection as a whole in order to at least have some reference to the archival context to which the single items belong.

This different approach means two things:

While EDM allows for hierarchical and sequential relations with the elements <dcterms:hasPart>, <dcterms:isPartOf> and <edm:isNextInSequence>, the hierarchical relations will be flattened, i.e. there is only a general "hasPart" and "isPartOf" relation between the fonds and collection as a whole and the single items, and the sequential relations might not necessarily be equivalent to what they are in the hierarchical archival structure as now a "nextInSequence" relation might point to an item that is not directly preceding the item we are looking at and might even be part of a different series when seen in the EAD finding aid.
The hierarchical inheritance of information that is inherent to archival description gets seemingly lost when transforming to EDM. Archives Portal Europe's EDM conversion tries to work around this by copying information that is usually inherited, e.g. the name of the records creator or the name of the holding repository, from higher levels to those lower levels that include the links to the digital objects - as long as those elements do not already exist on those lower levels anyway.

See all details of the EDM conversion in this apeEAD to EDM overview. There also is a cross-walk between ISAD(G) and EDM based on the current apeEAD to EDM conversion.

apeEAD Categories

EAD 2002 EAD3 Converting archival metadata to EDM

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What is Archives Portal Europe? How can I help?

Starting your search here will include all content available in Archives Portal Europe. Simply enter your keyword(s) and hit the search button. Wrap fixed expressions in quotation marks, e.g. “French Revolution”. Check the box to “Search each term separately” in case you are looking for documents containing at least one word, but not necessarily all keywords; this will also allow you to search for the same term in multiple languages at the same time (e.g. “French Revolution” “Révolution Française”). You can also use wildcards - find more about Research Tools here. If you would like to use more specific settings, try our Advanced search

The additional advanced search options give you the possibility to focus your search in:

archival documents (Search in archives),
names of person and organisations that created, worked with and maintained these documents (Search in names),
Institutions currently holding the documents (Search in institutions).

When searching with multiple terms at the same time, wrap fixed expressions in quotation marks (e.g. "French Revolution"), or check the box "Search each term separately" in case you are looking for either one term of the other. This will also allow you to search for the same term in multiple languages (e.g. "French Revolution" "Révolution française"). You can also choose one of the suggestions matching your search term once you start typing.

This will only show results that include documents that have been digitised and are available online

Use this option to search only one or more keywords, rather than all of them

Select where your search terms should appear specifically inside the archival description:

Title: search terms will appear in the title, or name, of the description
Content Summary: search terms will appear in the main description of the document or of the collection
Reference code: it is the identifier of the archival material as provided by the institution. Use this option if you know the exact reference code of the material you are looking for

You can filter results by selecting where your search terms appears specifically inside the archival description:

The name can be the full name of a person, family or organisation as well as only parts of it, e.g. only the last name.
The identifier is used internally by the institution or refers to (inter)national vocabularies such as the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).
The place can be the place of birth (or foundation), the place of death (or closing), the place of work or any other place of importance.
The occupation is the profession or job of a person.
The mandate is a law, directive or charter that establishes and defines an organisation's powers, functions, responsibilities or sphere of activities.
The function is an activity, role, or purpose performed or manifested by a person, family or organisation.

You can filter results by selecting where your search terms appears specifically inside the description of the archive:

Name: search term appears in the name of the institution. It can be the full name of an archival institution or only parts of it.
Place: search term appears in the address or area of the institution. It can be the city or town, where the archival institution is located or any other place of importance (e.g. previous locations)

A finding aid is a structured description of archival materials per collection or fonds, up to item level.
A holdings guide is an overview of the collections and fonds of one archival institution.
A source guide is a topic-oriented overview of collections and fonds of one or several institutions.

You can filter by one or more entity types:

A person (e.g. John Locke, or Jean Jaques Rousseau);
A family (e.g. Bonaparte, or Helgason);
A corporate body, i.e. the name of an institution, organisation, or company (e.g. Ministerie van Justitie, or Electro Mecánica Antonio Armentano)

Please note that this filter will only include institutions, for which a type has been provided as part of their descriptions:

A business archive holds the records of (often) commercial organisations.
A church or religious archive holds the records of church parishes or religious organisations, e.g. birth or death registers.
A county or local authority archive holds the records of the county's administrative bodies.
A media archive holds audiovisual or sound records, e.g. a film archive or the archive of a broadcasting company.
A municipal archive holds the records of a town or city administration.
A national archive holds the records of a country's administrative bodies, i.e. from ministries and other public bodies, sometimes also private papers of former ministers, chancellors, or presidents.
A private person or family archive holds the records forming the legacy of a prominent person or family.
A regional archive holds the records of a region's administrative bodies.
A specialised governmental archive holds records of public bodies, often operating on a national level, that are not part of the national archives' holdings.
A specialised non-governmental archive or archive of another cultural heritage institution hold collections from various cultural heritage institutions, eg. museum archives, libraries archives, etc
A university archive or archive of another research organisation holds the records pertaining to the administration of the according educational or research body.
Political parties, popular/labour movements and other non-governmental organisations, associations, agencies and foundations hold the archival collections of these institutions, outside of governmental records and outside of business archives (e.g., NGOs)

Enter a start and/or end date in the format DD-MM-YYYY, i.e. 01-01-1900 for 1 January 1900. This will allow you to focus your search on a specific period of time. You can use the calendar function or type directly in the text field. The checkbox "Exact date search" concentrates the search on one specific date.

Check "View in context" to view the results in the hierarchical structure of archives.

Choose "List view" to view the results in a simple list, ordered according to relevance or date
Choose "Context view" to view the results in the hierarchical structure of the holding archives.

For more details see Research Tools

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A holdings guide is an overview of the collections and fonds of one archival institution.

A finding aid is a structured description of archival materials per collection or fonds up to item level.

You can filter results by selecting one or more countries of interest. You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your filter selection will appear above. Click "Clear filters" to see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter results by one or more holding archival institutions. You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your filter selection will appear above. Click "Clear filters" to see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can select to view results from a specific Finding Aid, i.e., a structured description of archival materials per collection or fonds up to item level. You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your filter selection will appear above. Click "Clear filters" to see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter by type of descriptive document:

"Holdings Guide": an overview of the collections and fonds of one archival institution.
"Source guide": a topic-oriented overview of collections and fonds of one or several institutions. a description of the archival collections available. Similar to Holdings guides
"Finding aid" provides more detailed descriptions of the archival materials of specific collections or fonds

You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your filter selection will appear above. Click "Clear filters" to see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter results by selecting "Fonds description" for a general overview or "Other descriptions" for item level. You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your filter selection will appear above. Click "Clear filters" to see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter results by selecting only those containing digital objects, i.e. the link to the digitised version of the archival material you are looking for. You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your filter selection will appear above. Click "Clear filters" to see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter results by type of digital object you are interested in:

Text: most documental material, such as administrative records, letters, manuscripts etc.
Image: includes photographs, posters, maps.
Sound: sound recording with no images
Video: moving images with or without sound
Unspecified: indicates that the holding institution has not specified the type of digital object
3D: 3-d digital objects

You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your filter selection will appear above. Click "Clear filters" to see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter results based on the date of creation of the archival material (which may differ from the time period you are interested in - e.g., philosophers from the Enlightenment period reflecting on classic thinkers)

Full dates includes normalised date information available for date-based searches. It is recommended to combine this selection with the filters "Start timespan" and "End timespan" for more details.
Only descriptive dates provides the date information in human-readable format.
No date either includes documents where the creation date is unknown, or where date information is not in a machine-readable format

Please note that not all documents contain a machine-readable date. More information here

You can filter results based on the date of creation of the archival material (which may differ from the time period you are interested in - e.g., philosophers from the Enlightenment period reflecting on classic thinkers). This filter will only include materials with "Full dates", i.e. those that include date information available for date-based searches. You can either search for a specific date of interest or focus step by step on the time span of a century, decade, year or month. When searching for a specific date, enter the date in the format DD-MM-YYYY, i.e. 01/01/1900 for 1 January 1900, via the calendar function or by typing directly in the text field.
This filter concentrates on the earliest dates mentioned in the materials.

You can filter results based on the language in which the material is written. Please note that this filter will only include materials where specific language information has been provided by the institution and is therefore in a machine-readable format. You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your selection will then be displayed above the search results (see "Search filters"). Clicking "Clear filters" will remove your selection and you will see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter results by selecting one or more topics of interest. Please note that this filter will only include materials where the topic has been assigned and is therefore in a machine-readable format. Read how to assign a topic to documents on the Topics page. You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your selection will then be displayed above the search results (see "Search filters"). Clicking "Clear filters" will remove your selection and you will see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter results by selecting where your search terms appears specifically inside the archival description:

The name can be the full name of a person, family or organisation as well as only parts of it, e.g. only the last name.
The identifier is used internally by the institution or refers to (inter)national vocabularies such as the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).
The place can be the place of birth (or foundation), the place of death (or closing), the place of work or any other place of importance.
The occupation is the profession or job of a person
The mandate is a law, directive or charter that establishes and defines an organisation's powers, functions, responsibilities or sphere of activities.
The function is an activity, role, or purpose performed or manifested by a person, family or organisation

You can also combine this filter with other filters. Your selection will then be displayed above the search results (see "Search filters"). Clicking "Clear filters" will remove your selection and you will see all results matching your initial search request again.

You can filter results by type of entities:

Person (e.g., John Locke or Jean Jaques Rousseau)
Family (e.g., the family Bonaparte)
Corporate body (an institution, organisation, or company, e.g. the "Ministerie van Justitie")

You can filter results based on the type of holding institution. Please note that this filter will only include institutions, for which a type has been provided as part of their descriptions.

A business archive holds the records of (often) commercial organisations.
A church or religious archive holds the records of church parishes or religious organisations, e.g. birth or death registers.
A county or local authority archive holds the records of the county's administrative bodies.
A media archive holds audiovisual or sound records, e.g. a film archive or the archive of a broadcasting company.
A municipal archive holds the records of a town or city administration.
A national archive holds the records of a country's administrative bodies, i.e. from ministries and other public bodies, sometimes also private papers of former ministers, chancellors, or presidents.
A private person or family archive holds the records forming the legacy of a prominent person or family.
A regional archive holds the records of a region's administrative bodies.
A specialised governmental archive holds records of public bodies, often operating on a national level, that are not part of the national archives' holdings.
A specialised non-governmental archive or archive of another cultural heritage institution hold collections from various cultural heritage institutions, eg. museum archives, libraries archives, etc
A university archive or archive of another research organisation holds the records pertaining to the administration of the according educational or research body.
Political parties, popular/labour movements and other non-governmental organisations, associations, agencies and foundations hold the archival collections of these institutions, outside of governmental records and outside of business archives (e.g., NGOs)

Write your message in your own language and use this drop-down menu to have your message translated into English or in the language of the institution for a swifter response. By checking this box and selecting a language you will send your original message along with the translated version

What kind of suggestion would you like to make?

Assign to topic: assign this record to one of our Topics. Topics are created following the Unesco Thesaurus
Suggest translation: If you have translated this archival description or the documents themselves, please send it to us as a .doc or .pdf file
Connect to another resource: If this object relates to another resource in Archives Portal Europe, or anywhere else on the web (e.g., an article on Wikipedia), you can suggest it to be linked to this resource
Other: If you have any other relevant material, such as a transcription of the document, please upload it and let us know here

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This object is in the public domain, but is subject to known legal restrictions other than copyright which prevent its free re-use. Please contact the providing institution for more information.

This object is currently in copyright. Please contact the providing institution for more information and in order to acquire additional permissions for re-use.

The copyright status of this object has not been evaluated yet. Please contact the providing institution for more information.

Please contact the providing institution for more information and in order to acquire additional permissions for any other uses.