EHRI Workshop: Publishing Finding Aids in a Digitally Joined-up World

Op 17 november organiseert DANS namen het project European Holocaust Research Infrastructure een workshop over workflows voor het maken en publiceren van archiefbeschrijving. Ook archivarissen van Nederlandse instellingen zijn van harte uitgenodigd:

You are cordially invited to an EHRI workshop at DANS, in The Hague, the Netherlands, on 17 November 2015 on the topic of workflows that archives use to catalogue and publish information about their holdings. The workshop aims to get input from people who are part of the cataloguing workflow.

Topics

How do you make people more aware about your archival holdings? Is it difficult and time-consuming to reach your public digitally? Would you like to communicate to your website users that you are part of a digital infrastructure and the advantages this brings? Are you part of a project that wants your institution to provide metadata but you run into technical problems and need specialist skills?

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) would like to help archives to publish their finding aids in ways that are useful for people and for computers; after all computers are now users too!

Archives and research infrastructures

Many archives already publish their finding aids and holdings guides on their websites for people to browse before they plan a visit to the archive. However, we are seeing a change in how researchers, in particular, wish to find and use information for their research questions; across many sources, in many languages, and many locations. To address the needs of researchers there are increasingly many specialised research infrastructures, like DARIAH, EHRI, CENDARI, and other national and international projects, that aggregate information about archival holdings. It is important for an archive to manage how it handles requests from, and provides information to, the research and data infrastructures, in a sustainable manner that doesn’t get in the way of an archive’s core business. Equally, it is important for the research infrastructures to receive current and relevant information to support their communities of researchers.

Digitally joined-up world

This is the first of a number of small scale workshops and interviews EHRI will hold to find out more about the workflows that archivists and cataloguers in collection holding institutions use to catalogue and publish information about their holdings. This knowledge helps us to create tools that can interfere with and improve these workflows and provide the extra steps to publish finding aids in this digitally joined-up world.

The workshops will be interactive and the information that you provide will help to define the requirements for the tools. Hopefully it will also help you to evaluate your own workflows and learn about those of other archives.

To register for this workshop (before November 9) and for questions please email:ben.companjen@dans.knaw.nl.

Lunch will be provided, and for those staying overnight before the meeting, EHRI organizes a workshop dinner.

Further details on how to get to DANS and where to stay will be forwarded to attendees after registration.

Presentations and discussion will be in English.

The workshop starts at 10:00h and ends around 16:30h. The final programme will be published shortly.