A. SCOPE 2

C. METHODOLOGY 4

A. SCOPE

This project will make available to the citizens of Europe information which is central to their culture and history and which is the documentary guarantee of their democratic rights. This is the information held in the national archives of Scotland, Sweden and Italy and in the International Institute for Social History in the Netherlands.

It is the intention of the project to develop both theoretical and practical tools as a major step towards a European archive network. The theoretical tools will enable European archive institutions to describe their holdings in such a way that the information can be readily exchanged with other institutions and with researchers, while the practical tools will demonstrate how such a network might look and feel.

Type of Information Content

By definition, national archives contain information of national importance. Their holdings cover the whole range of information listed in the Info2000 call:

In practice, the archival material to be described will be a mix of different content type and will include graphical information, maps and plans, photographs, etc. Some digital images of documents may be used in the project for testing purposes, but the costs of producing these images are not included in project budget

Archival descriptive systems are ‘top down’, that is they are based on the fonds or collection level, in contrast to library and museum descriptive systems which are ‘bottom up’ that is based on the object level. This approach reflects the archival emphasis upon context as the key to understanding content.

EUAN will be principally concerned with top level finding aids that is, the descriptions of archival materials at the level of fonds, as a means of providing access to the total holdings of the archive. These will typically give the name, the covering dates, and a summary of contents. In some cases, an administrative history of the organisation is also given. In the case of Scotland, Sweden and the International Institute of Social History, these finding aids will be provided for all holdings of the archive within the prototype system. In the case of Italy, where automation has been more limited, top level finding aid information will be included only for selected fonds, namely the Allied Control Commission records.

All partners will contribute content. Outlines of the range of archival material covered in each partner archive are given in Appendix 1.

Geographical Areas

The geographical areas covered by the consortium are Scotland, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands. These are at the core of the project but information about other countries will also be included. For example each National Archive, for historical reasons, holds information on other countries: Sweden on Denmark, and Scotland on France. The target information is held in the participating archives, in Edinburgh, Stockholm, Rome and Amsterdam. At present different groups of citizens have different rights of access in principle and in practice to this information.

B. OBJECTIVES

The aim of the project is to open up access to the information in these archives to all the citizens of Europe. To do this both archival and technical problems will be addressed. The archival problem is that the contributing archives all have separate national cataloguing conventions, terminologies and assumptions. The technical problem is that each has developed a separate information technology approach and system. The objective is to look at the different archival systems and to make proposals for common methods of archival description. The project will also look at the separate IT systems and make similar proposals for linking them, for example by investigating the application of protocols such as US ANSI standard Z39.50, to large datasets of structured information. The project will explore enhanced access to the national archives of the participating partners by means of controlled vocabularies, cataloguing conventions and structured information protocols. It will also investigate the use of the new Document Type Definition (DTD) known as Encoded Archival Description or EAD. The end result will be a prototype public interface to the participating archives.

To illustrate the current problem, the National Archives of Scotland contains significant amounts of information relating to Sweden, its history and its peoples. This information is not available to Swedish users because it is located in Edinburgh, it is mainly written in English, it is arranged and catalogued in a British way and there is no link between the automated systems in the two national archives. This proposal will provide solutions to each of these problems. The potential quantity of information which will be opened up by this project is immense. Between them the partners preserve several hundred kilometres of archival materials. Details are given in Appendix 1.

The products resulting from this project will consist of a series of trans-national protocols and guidelines for archival description, and a multi-lingual prototype interface for accessing the top level finding aids in these national archives. This will include an automated multi-lingual dictionary of technical archival terms. The ultimate aim is to create a European-wide network that is accessible to all its citizens. Scotland has already started developing a network of all Scottish archives, and this project as is the logical next step. All the research carried out in preparation for the Scottish Archive Network will be made available to the EUAN project.

Archivists have realised for some years that these issues must be addressed at the international level. The countries involved in this proposal have already worked together on various international projects under the auspices of the International Council on Archives (ICA) to begin to find solutions, for example on issues of terminology and archival automation. This proposal will build on work already completed.

Apart from SCAN, the Scottish Archive Network, another relevant initiative in a European archive is the Arkis project by the Riksarkivet in Sweden. Representatives of both networks will be closely involved in this project. Other relevant initiatives include:

The project plan will pursue the following objectives:

Addressing the archival problems:

 
Addressing the technical problems:

One of the aims will be to investigate to what extent the standardised descriptive systems are capable of handling different media and formats of archive material.

Throughout the project it is essential that consideration be given to how European archives that have not yet automated their finding aids can ultimately be smoothly integrated into the network. This will be the particular responsibility of the Italian partner.
 

A Staged Approach to Archival and Technical Problems

The different stages are described more fully below.

1. The project will examine the finding aid systems and structure in each of the four archives. Each participating archive will provide to the project (on paper, and in electronic form if it exists) the top level finding aid of the archive and the cataloguing rules used. Summaries of these will be provided in English (translation costs are not part of the project budget).

2. It will develop a unified approach, compatible with each national system of description, and using current international archive standards. This will be developed from the information gathered in stage 1 above. It will look in detail at the guidelines provided by ISAD(G) and see how they can be adapted to the existing practices of the project partners. It will also use as its terminological basis the ICA Dictionary of Archival Terminology.

3. It will identify areas where incompatibilities remain and where further standards could be developed at a European or international level. For example The UK rules for the construction of personal, place and corporate names will be compared with the rules in the project partner archives, incompatibilities will be identified and the need for further standards identified, if necessary.

4. It will examine the computerised finding aid systems in each partner archive.

Each partner archive will contribute to the project a description of its computerised finding aid system, again with a summary in English. 

5. It will investigate linking these systems by technical means and provide suggested routes.

6. The archival and technical solutions will be linked and the project will then provide recommendations to solve the problems of access by both archival and technical means. Thus some problems identified in, for example stage 3 above may find technical rather than archival solutions. New standards may not be required, rather the solutions may be technical.

7. The project will, as an end result, provide a shared prototype public interface to the participating archives of Sweden, Scotland, Italy and the Netherlands. This will also incorporate an automated multi-lingual dictionary of technical archival terms. The construction of the interface will be sub-contracted to Electrum Multimedia Ltd; an IT expert from SCAN will also be involved.

Further details of the work and products are given in the Inf 3 and 4 forms attached.

Risk Analysis

A number of risks have been identified:

Risk One : Failure of one consortium member

Contingency:

Contingency

Contingency:

Contingency:

The project work will be divided between two expert groups. One will deal with the archival aspects of the project, the other will deal with the information technology aspects. The Archival Group will consist of one representative of each of the partner archives, who will be experts in the area of cataloguing. It will include outside members, both internationally recognised experts in archival descriptive standards. It will be chaired by Dr Ishbel Barnes of SCAN Ltd.

The Information Technology Group will consist of a representative of each of the partner archives, who are experts in computing, plus a representative of the sub-contractor.

Co-ordinating the work of the two groups will be a small project board, chaired by George MacKenzie of NAS. 

Two outside experts will assist the project on a part-time basis: Dr Chris Kitching, of the Historic Manuscripts Commission, UK, former chair of the ICA Commission on Descriptive Standards, and Peter Horsman, of the Netherlands archives, chair of the ICA Committee on Information Technology.

The Groups will hold meetings in accordance with the schedule in the Inf3 form, at different locations. Much of their work will, however, be carried out electronically, through exchange of draft documents. The Board will hold four meetings during the project: one at the beginning, two progress meetings at approximately 8 and 16 months and a final meeting to review and approve products and other outcomes. In the periods between meetings, it will conduct further virtual meetings by e-mail and by teleconferencing to approve work plans and initial products.

To control the project a methodology will be adopted that is acceptable to all partners, for example PRINCE (PRojects IN a Controlled Environment. Documentary tracking of progress will also be introduced using a dedicated software package, e.g. MS Project.

In practice, there will be very close co-operation between NAS and SCAN personnel in the project; without which it could not be carried out successfully.
 

Roles of Partners

The archival partners (NAS, RA, NAI, IISG) will:

The principal data with which this project is concerned are the top level finding aids in each participating national archive. These have all been compiled by the staff of the archive concerned, and copyright in them lies with the institution. In each case there is no legal restriction on public access to the data contained in the finding aids, though in practice geographic, cultural and language barriers limit access.

There is no restriction on public access to the majority of the archive holdings, to which the finding aids relate. In some cases, based on national legislation, there are restrictions on access, for example to government records less than 30 years old. This project will draw attention to the holdings of public archives, but it will not affect national legislation or regulations on access.

Commonality with National Projects

The experience of planning and implementing national projects in two of the partner countries, Scotland and Sweden, will be brought to bear on EUAN which will, in effect, develop the principles from these national projects to a pan-European level. The problems being addressed by EUAN are closely related to those faced by SCAN. The problems facing Scottish archives, which were listed in Appendix 3 of the original proposal, are faced by every European country. It is the aim of EUAN to address these in a European rather than national context. SCAN addresses the problem in one nation, while EUAN will provide the path to solving the same problems in every European country. Similarly, the experience of the Swedish Arkis project will be brought to bear on the European-level problems.

SCAN

The SCAN project is intended to open up access to Scottish archives using the Internet. It will involve some 42 archive institutions in Scotland, whose top level finding aids will be standardised and made available through a single SCAN server. The network will also provide additional services, including exhibitions, a bookshop and threaded discussions, to its users.

SCAN will feed into EUAN in a variety of ways. First, and most obvious, the staff working on EUAN will also be involved in SCAN, and will bring their experience of the planning process to bear on the European project. Second, SCAN, like Arkis, will seek to link data about diverse archive institutions and make it available in a single, coherent way, which is exactly the aim of EUAN. Third, the work on standardising and mounting the top level finding aids of Scottish archives will provide a possible model for EUAN to follow. For example, SCAN will use the ICA descriptive standards for data content, and will closely examine the EAD approach to data structure and the Z39.50 protocol for data delivery and retrieval. These will all be important points for EUAN also, and the results of SCAN planning and investigation, as of Arkis, will be of immense benefit to the European project. Fourth, SCAN may offer a blueprint for the further development of EUAN, including the integration of additional services, some of which may offer future business opportunities. (Further details of this last point are given at Continuation of Service below.)

Arkis

Arkis is the system underlying the national archival database (NAD) project in Sweden. It is run by the national archives (RA), and covers institutions at national, sub-national and local level. NAD is distributed on CD-ROM and contains general information on 150,000 fonds, finding aid information for around 12,000 fonds, together with a historic topographical database and administrative histories, which help users to understand the fonds. Arkis version I, a relational database running on a PC, is now being replaced by Arkis II. The new version will be able to handle multilevel archival description, manage additional information on fonds (e.g. deposit agreements, conservation history, disposal schedules) and manage microfilms and electronically generated records. Arkis II adopts a somewhat different approach to SCAN, in that it aims to integrate management and administrative information with descriptive information into a single data structure, while SCAN will deal with this by linking systems.

The strengths of Arkis are that it is a working, national system, and applicable to different sizes of archive organisation. Arkis and SCAN will each provide an additional perspective to the EUAN project.
 

Synergy with other International Initiatives

European Internet Network

This is an initiative launched by the Federal Archives of Switzerland to provide an Internet gateway to European national archives which have websites. The initiative was endorsed at the meeting of the European Board of the International Council on Archives (ICA/EUR) in Bern in May. It concentrates on guiding users to the right place, using the existing technology and standards. Its main advantages are its simplicity and the fact that it has been widely supported. The EUAN approach, which will investigate underlying archival and computing standards, will be entirely complementary to the ICA/EUR initiative. EUAN will use the participants in the ICA/EUR gateway to disseminate, and hopefully test, the results of their studies. Initial contacts have already been established between EUAN and the relevant staff in the Swiss archives. ICA/EUR are aware of the EUAN project proposal and very supportive of it.

DLM Forum

The main emphasis of the DLM forum is on electronic records, that is on archive material that has been generated electronically, whereas EUAN is concerned with all archival material, irrespective of media or format. The main areas of synergy lie in standards for describing and accessing electronic records. It is our view that co-operation between the DLM Forum and EUAN will enhance both projects, widening their perspective and increasing their profile.
 

EVA

Contact has also been established with the European Visual Archive (EVA) project which has also been shortlisted for INFO2000 funding. EVA is concerned with the practicalities of making digital images from archives available across the Internet. There are therefore significant areas for co-operation between the two projects, concerning the ways in which archival materials are described, and the mechanisms for searching and retrieval.
 

Other Initiatives

EUAN will also maintain close links with the work of the ICA Committee on Descriptive Standards and the Committee on Information Technology, both of which are relevant to the project. One of the EUAN participants, Dr Ishbel Barnes, is a member of the latter committee. The outside experts (Peter Horsman and Chris Kitching) that will be participating in the project are also involved in these committees.
 

Benefits

The products of the archival group (standards, prototype etc.) will be used by the participating archives and placed in the public domain.

The products of the information technology group (programs, prototype systems, etc.) will be made available to the participating archives and to SCAN. They will also be made available to other public archives wishing to exchange data and to offer access to their holdings across the Internet. They will be placed in the public domain and made available for downloading from the SCAN website. The aim will be to maximise the use of these products as far as possible among other European archives.

The major benefit of the project will be in opening up access to archives for users in different countries via the Internet. This will be a public benefit, accruing to everyone with Internet access and an interest in the archive holdings.

E. THE MARKET AND USER POPULATION

Types of User

There will be both intermediate and end users. The intermediate users will include archivists in the partner institutions and in other institutions in the partner countries, who will use information from the top level finding aids in understanding and evaluating further archival material and in compiling their own finding aids of this material. There will also be journalists using the top level information to research and write articles based on the archive holdings.

The end users will however, be more numerous and they are the principal market for this project and its products. They will be from a wide variety of occupational and social groups and range from ordinary citizens to academic researchers, from students to school pupils and from professional historians to amateur genealogists. Ordinary citizens will use the information to understand and exercise their individual and collective rights, researchers and journalists will use it to interpret government policies and thereby ensure their accountability, others will use the information for cultural and historical purposes. Increased usage of archive holdings and facilities can be expected as a result of the project.

Current Information Use

Currently, use of the information contained in the partner archives is restricted to those able to make personal visits. In practice this means those living within easy reach of the capital cities: Edinburgh, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Rome. For those further afield, access is difficult and for those in other countries, it is even more so. In addition to these geographic obstacles, there are two additional barriers to users from other European countries. The first is a lack of familiarity with the administrative and cultural traditions that affect the way in which the archives in each country are arranged and described. The second is the barrier of language.

The project will break down these geographic, cultural and language barriers. It will do so, firstly by using Internet as the delivery vehicle, ensuring round the clock, trans-border access for citizens of other countries. Secondly, by providing standardised descriptions and carefully equating the levels of description, it will allow the user to understand the administrative context in which each fond (organic group of records created by an organisation or individual) was created. Thirdly, by providing an interface in the user’s own language, with familiar help commands, together with access to a range of software tools, for example a multilingual dictionary of technical archival terms, it will help the user to understand the content of the top level finding aids. Automated translation facilities will also be investigated.

Use of Information

The project will, by breaking down these barriers, enable the information to be used widely by a range of users in different countries. The top level finding aids will allow users to select documents or ranges of documents in which they are interested, and to access them in a variety of ways, ranging from personal visits to ordering photocopies or, eventually, digital images. A small part of the project will examine the problems of producing and delivering digital images for remote users.

Benefits

The benefits of greater access to and use of the archives will include a strengthening of democratic rights and government accountability, an increased understanding of cultural and national identities across Europe and new possibilities for national and international research by historians and social scientists.

User Needs and Involvement

User needs are clearly a vital part of the project and will be tackled at different levels.

The potential market for the interface and for other products from the project includes both the intermediate users, which are potentially all public archives in Europe that are, or are considering, automating their finding aids, and end users, who will be the public, ranging from scholarly researchers to ordinary citizens. It is not possible to survey general users within the scope of this project. However, all archival partners will be encouraged to set up focus groups of existing archive users, to test out assumptions about their needs and wishes, and to demonstrate and trial products.

Intermediate users will be involved in the project through each of the partner organisations. Archival and technical staff in these organisations will contribute to testing and evaluating the project’s products. Dissemination of interim and final results to members of the archival community will further promote this. End users will be involved, both through consultations at individual level with selected persons, and through official channels in each country. In Scotland, for example, the Scottish Records Advisory Council, a statutory body comprising academics, lawyers and users which advises the government on archive policy, will be directly consulted, as will the equivalent bodies in the other partner countries. In addition, each archival partner will organise a focus group, drawn from as wide a range of current archive users as possible, to validate assumptions, gauge opinions and test prototypes and ideas.

The requirements of the market, in so far as these can be identified for public and free information, are for more and easier access. This is the entire raison d’être of this project.
 

F. FINANCIAL SUMMARY

NAS

NAS will provide 3 members of staff on a part-time basis

RA

The Riksarkivet will provide 2 members of staff on a part-time basis

The National Archives of Italy will provide one archivist member of staff on a part-time basis

IISG

The Institute will provide 2 members of staff on a part-time basis:

SCAN will provide 2 members of staff on a part time basis for the project. These are:

Other Contributions

In addition each of the partners will provide accommodation to host meetings and will provide resources to maintain contact by phone and e-mail.
Part of the technical work will be sub-contracted. It is expected that Electrum Multimedia Ltd, based in Edinburgh, will provide consultancy and expertise and software development for project. This will involve one consultant and one software engineer part-time.
 

Future Funding

The bulk of the costs involved in the project will be provided by the partners contributing staff time in developing a prototype and strategy for a European Archival Network. The main costs of developing the project further will fall on new participating archives contributing additional content to the model that has been developed here.

SCAN will be able to provide a continuing platform for the material developed in this project to be made available and will act as a clearing house for further refinements that are made to it by any of the partner archives. It will also be able to provide, on a paid basis, consultancy to other European archives who wish to implement the EUAN products.
 

G. TECHNOLOGIES

Systems and Standards

The project will address both archival and technical or computing issues. On the archival side, it will seek to use the existing descriptive systems in each archive, making them fully compliant with the ISAD(G) standards (see appendix 4) where necessary. On the technical side, it will again seek to make use of and integrate the existing computer systems in each archive. It will examine Encoded Archival Description (EAD). This is a document type definition and may offer a common way of structuring the finding aid data. Much attention is being focused on EAD at present in the English speaking world, and one of the aspects of the project will be to see if it can also be applied in different languages and different descriptive systems. The project will also look at the Z39.50 protocol which is concerned with ways of getting access to data from remote computers. Recommendations on the application of these and other standards to archival descriptive systems across Europe will form part of the report from the project (see workpackage 4). The prototype interface planned in workpackage 6 will be written to access information held in SGML format.
 

New Features

The prototype interface will be innovative. It is intended to provide an entry route to finding aids in remote archives in the user's own language, with a range of familiar help facilities and also access to a range of software tools, such as applications to retrieve and present information. There will be an automated multi-lingual dictionary of archival terms available to help users understand the technical vocabulary in finding aids. Links to automated translation services will be considered.
 

Language

Initially, the aim is to support English, Swedish and Italian. The integration of further languages, including Dutch, French and German, will be considered during the project, but it may not be possible to implement these. Once again, user needs as defined by the participant institutions will be the determining factor. It is recognised, however, that further language development, particularly French and German, will enhance the attractiveness of the products to other European users.

It is intended to use a degree of automatic translation. For example, a technical archival dictionary exists in English, French, Spanish, German and Russian, and translations exist from this base to a further 5 languages. The vocabulary is limited and so can be relatively easily automated. This will be at the heart of the multi-lingual interface. Beyond this, the availability and practicality of using instant translation services through the Internet will be tested.
 

Searching and Retrieval of Information

Retrieving information is of key importance and the project will investigate different means of doing this, including free text retrieval (as in the NAS), structured searching, and hybrid combinations (as in Arkis). The wide experience within the consortium members gives a range of possibilities. Planning for the SCAN project has also suggested the possibility of a web browser approach, formatting the text to be searched so that it can be accessed by different user software. There is also much interest in using EAD (Encoded Archival Description), which is a Document Type Definition based on the SGML language, for archival description. At present SGML and therefore EAD tags are not supported by web browsers, but it is expected that this will change when browsers supporting the new XML language are introduced shortly. These are areas where co-operation with the EVA project will be particularly valuable.

It is not intended to integrate the data in different archives, but the question of multiple institution searching will certainly be addressed. The Z39.50 protocol mentioned above is intended to do just that: to enable a user to ask the same question across a range of different databases, and get back a comprehensive answer. It is not possible to say whether this will work across several archives in different countries and languages, but it is one of the questions the project will investigate.
 

Work to be Done

The hardware requirement is very small and is for standard equipment only in the case of the National Archives of Italy. Its procurement will be handled under the normal rules in that organisation.

The software, as mentioned above, will be specially written for the project, by the sub-contracted software engineers of EML. SCAN Ltd will also provide an IT expert to work on this. The software is likely to be partly based on other web interfaces which Electrum have produced, for example for the SCRAN (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network) project, but it will also have specific and unique features. The stages for its production, which are given in workpackage 6, include analysis of requirements, specification, design, initial implementation and testing, modification and further testing, followed by installation and review.

 
H. STRATEGIC IMPACT

The main strategic impact of the project will be in providing Internet access into a number of information-rich public data holders, allowing significantly greater dissemination of the data to a trans-European public. The major benefit will accrue to Europe’s citizens, who will have:

Performance Indicators

The performance indicators will be principally the usage of the archives. This can be measured firstly in numbers of users, and secondly in the number of documents consulted. The Internet will ensure that speed and convenience of access will be greatly enhanced, and this will lead to an overall increase in usage figures. Some typical usage measures are given below:

Prototype

The project will act as a catalyst for similar developments in other archives in the European Union, both from a demand side, by demonstrating to citizens and researchers what is possible, and from a supply side, by providing national archives with a prototype for opening up access.
 

Synergy with Other Programmes

There is clear synergy between this proposal and parts of the "Guidelines - Memorandum of Understanding on Open Access to electronic commerce for European Small and Medium-sized Enterprises" published on 25 February 1998. In particular, the guidelines on developing an architecture for electronic commerce will strongly influence the way this project approaches the information technology aspects of accessing information on remote systems in other archives. In addition, the approach to archival description, with its emphasis on authenticity and reliability, will offer insights and practices, that will be highly relevant to the guidelines on rights and responsibilities.

This proposal goes directly towards fulfilling the European Commission Resolution of 4 April 1995 on culture and multimedia; there is also synergy with certain programmes of the Commission in the cultural field, notably the Raphael programme. Raphael is particularly oriented towards the museum and built heritage, rather than the documentary heritage of which archives form a part. However, this proposal shares some of the general objectives of Raphael, including support to networks and partnerships and contributing to the strengthening of trans-national co-operation by exchanging and pooling experience, as well as facilitating citizens’ access to heritage. It will be important to develop and maintain links with the results of this programme and to feed them into the EUAN project.

There is also clear synergy with the Commission initiative to set up the DLM forum on electronic records. This initiative, co-ordinated by the Commission Archives in Brussels, is concerned with the problems of documents created in electronic form, some of which will eventually be preserved in public archives. It recently published Guidelines on Best Practices for Using Electronic Information. There will be significant opportunities for co-operation between the DLM Forum and EUAN, notably in the areas of top level descriptions and in common Internet user interfaces.
 

I. DISSEMINATION
 

European Commission Archives

Those principally interested in the progress and results of the project will be other archives, within and outside the European Union. The first main means of dissemination will be to work with the Commission Archives and to use its publication Insar (International Summary on Archives) to promote the work and results of the project to the public archives of the EU member states.
 

International Council on Archives

A second main means of disseminating information will be through the International Council on Archives, of which all the participating archives are members. ICA has around 1,700 members in over 170 countries and territories, giving it a truly international reach. Its members include national archive institutions, national associations of archivists, other archive institutions and individual archivists. ICA has a printed bulletin and a website, and both these will be used to keep all members of the organisation informed of progress and results.

Within ICA there are also 3 specialised bodies with a particular interest. First is the European Board, which brings together representatives of national archives in geographical Europe and North America, and which has an interest in developing Europe-wide archival initiatives. The Board has developed a proposal for a European Internet network based around a common homepage. In addition to the obvious synergy with this project, the homepage can also be used to disseminate information on the project to European archives and their users.

The second body within ICA with a particular interest in this project is the Committee on Descriptive Standards, which is a small group of expert archivists working on developing international standards for describing archive materials. This committee was responsible for the ISAD(G) standard now being widely implemented by the profession world-wide. The Committee is in regular contact with descriptive standards experts in archives throughout the world, and by involving one of its experts in the work of the project, we will ensure that the results are regularly and widely communicated. The committee is also in regular contact with experts in related professions, including libraries and specialised audio-visual and film archives, thus further widening its reach.

The third body in ICA is its Committee on Information Technology. This is another small expert group working on standards and guidelines for archival automation. Two members of the committee, from Scotland and Italy, will be directly involved in the project groups. This committee is also in regular contact with leading experts in the archive and information technology worlds, and can be used as a means of disseminating information about the project and also for evaluation of the results.
 

Methods of Dissemination

The means of dissemination will be varied, depending on the product. Reports will be made available in paper or electronic form, and available for downloading from the project website. Other selected results of the project will be disseminated in paper and electronic form. SCAN will take responsibility for the paper versions, RA will take responsibility for putting material on CDs. Allied to this will be presentation of interim results of the project at professional meetings of archivists in selected European Union countries (expected to be France, Germany and Spain) during 1999-2000. An open meeting to present the results will be held at the XIV International Congress on Archives, in Seville, Spain, in September 2000.

The key documents will be distributed directly to national archives in the EU and to the editors of professional journals. Software produced for the project will be placed in the public domain and where practical made available for downloading from the website.
 

Results

The expected result of this dissemination will be increased interest in the project and adoption of its products, especially its recommended standards and protocols and the prototype interface, in archives throughout the world. This will in turn lead to market opportunities for further software development, to customise and integrate the prototype into national systems. It will also lead to increased access to the archive holdings that are described.

The dissemination of the results, and the promotion of their adoption, is a key feature of the project. Co-ordinating this work will be one of the specific responsibilities of the project board. The board will take delivery of each product and ensure it is disseminated to the most concerned people as quickly as possible.

EUAN Project Scope and Content of Archive Material Included

 
 

Partner	No of Fonds	Extent of Fonds (linear metres)	% of Fonds  included in the Project	Summary of Fond Contents	% of Fonds for which Detailed Finding Aids exist in Electronic Form
National Archives of Scotland	15,000	58,000	100%	· Records of the institutions of the pre-1707 kingdom of Scotland;  · Records of Scottish Office departments;  · Records of Scottish nationalised industries, rail, coal, gas and steel  · Records of the central courts, civil and criminal  · Registers of property and private rights in Scotland  · Local authority records  · Records of the Church of Scotland and other churches in Scotland;  · Special collections of shipbuilding records, of maps and plans and of seals  · Collections of private papers, of families and commercial undertakings.	20%
Riksarkivet	13,600	236,000	100%	· Records of all central government agencies, including parliament  · Records of government offices, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs  · Records of the Supreme Court of Justice and other central courts  · Collections of private papers of national importance, belonging to politicians, artists, authors	30%
IISG	2,000	8,000	100%	· Records of Dutch, French, German, Spanish, and Russian political parties, trade unions and other labour-related organisations  · Records of the Socialist International, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, European Trade Confederation, Amnesty International and other international organisations  · Collections of papers of individuals connected to the above organisations	15%
National Archives of Italy	1	1,360	1.5%	· Records of the Allied Control Commission (Italy), 1943-1947 (the Commission exercised military powers over the country and also ran the administration in the liberated areas during the reconstruction period)	0%