Linking to digital content
Archives Hub descriptions can include digital representations of the described materials, known as digital archival objects.
Representations may be:
- digital surrogates of paper-based archives
- objects that are part of the described materials, e.g. images that are born-digital
Images can be embedded into descriptions; any other digital content can be linked to.
Please note that this should not be used for linking to external objects, which are not part of the materials being described. You can add links to external resources in many fields within your description by using the <extref> tag if you are creating EAD.
Options for Digital Objects
If you are exporting from an Archival Management System then we can take and link to digital content provided we can get a full URL from your catalogue. If you only use internal links in your catalogue then we have no way to grab the content - it is not publicly available.
Displaying objects at collection level and lower-levels
Digital objects can be displayed either at collection level or component level (series, file, item). Item-level descriptions are particularly appropriate, as images and files can then be added at the individual level. You may wish to add lower-level descriptions to your collection-level descriptions already on the Hub and include images or links to other digital objects.
Location of Digital Objects
We will take a local copy of any images that you upload, and use that for display on the Hub website. However, any image or other file should always include an active and up-to-date URL. It is therefore important to ensure that the URL provided for the content is persistent.
Copyright
It is the responsibility of the Hub contributor to ensure that they have permission to make images and other objects publicly available over the Internet.