Digitisation Programmes
ENArC allows for a simple access to the historical and cultural memory of Europe for all European citizens and for the scientific research of European history. Thus, the knowledge of the birth and growth of Europe’s culture is open to the entire population to the same degree. ENArC intends to increasingly include the general public in the contentwise processing of the European cultural heritage, whereas the development and implementation of uniform indexing standards and regulations will safeguard easy handling and consequently the practical usability of historical sources.
Every European will be able to participate in the commenting and processing of archival records in a simple and easy way.
The digitisation activities carried out within the scope of ENArC do not intend to create a new digital library, but rather to integrate and publish all contents within the framework of already existing relevant platforms (please see below). This bundles capacities and competences and warrant an effective and continuous availability of all contents:
- All contents (both descriptive metadata and digital objects) will be made available through national portals (e.g. ArhiNET in Croatia, Kulturpool in Austria) or content-related portals (e.g. for charters Monasterium.Net).
...how it used to be. Here: Reading room, Třeboň (CZ)
- That way, content will be integrated into the nascent Archives Portal Europe. ICARUS as a full member of the APEx Consortium ensures a close and coordinated cooperation.
- Furthermore, there will be direct access to all digital objects via Europeana.
Within ENArC each project partner is allocated their own budget for digitisation and indexing activities. Choosing which archival stock to process is done after the principle of transnationality, meaning that archival records with a special relation to other countries will be given priority.
The above activities also serve to gain new experiences and knowledge that may be shared within the Consortium. Consequently ENArC is in more than one way a complementary initiative to the above-named portals:
- While the latter basically deal with developing the technical pre-requisites for merging existing electronic and digital information on archival material in European commemorative institutions, given project aims at institutionalising and coordinating the workload before and after with the objective of making high-quality content available on those portals.
- Other than that, the project guarantees an extension of today’s content into the Archives Portal Europe and Europeana with material from large parts of Southern, Central and Eastern Europe where most Consortium members come from.
