The Archives Portal Europe

The Archives Portal Europe (APE), aggregates descriptions of archives from across Europe APE logo

The Archives Hub and APE

The Archives Hub contributes data on behalf of UK institutions by means of monthly harvests taken by APE. 

To set you up as a contributor to APE:

  • You have to sign a Metadata Exchange Agreement to agree to the APE open data agenda, and also to specify the licence that you want for your data. We will send you the licence when you are set up on the Archives Hub.
  • We upload your Hub repository entry to APE. You can see the APE repository entries if you go to the APE website, choose 'Directory' and then select any individual repository.
  • APE will send you a login to access the APE Dashboard.
  • We will set up the data harvest for you. APE will harvest every month, including adding new descriptions and deleting anything that you have deleted from the Hub.
  • Note that if you want to delete something from APE quickly you can use the Dashboard (see below) or ask us to do it for you.

The APE Dashboard

The Dashboard enables you to log into APE to browse your descriptions and edit your repository entry. You can also un-publish and re-publish. We have a short video guide on the APE Dashboard (opens in YouTube).

If you are not sure what your login is, please email us.

The APE Repository entry

If you become part of APE then we upload your Hub repository entry.

The APE dashboard has a form that you can use to edit the description of your repository on the APE website. However we recommend that you notify us of changes directly via email, and we will update APE when we update Archives Hub, so that the sites remain in sync.

If you do wish to edit your entry directly within APE, you need to log into the APE Dasbboard. We have produced a short video on editing your repository (opens in YouTube).

The directory entries on the Hub and on APE are held in Encoded Archival Guide (EAG). This is an XML encoding standard for ISDIAH (International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings).

Contributing to APE directly

You can become a contributor to APE directly, without contributing to the Archives Hub. To do this you will need to use their Dashboard to upload EAD descriptions that comply with their requirements. We can support you in using the Dashboard, but we won't be able to help you with normalising your data if you are not contributing to the Hub.