FITUG e.V. Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

EU Archive Network Project

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date:          Fri, 18 Dec 1998 18:34:37 +0000
From:          Emanuella Giavarra <ecup.secr@dial.pipex.com>
To:            ecup-list@kaapeli.fi
Subject:       EU Archive Network Project
Reply-to:      ecup-list@kaapeli.fi

(from lis-european-programmes)

European Union Archive Network Project

EUAN is a project for the Info2000 initiative launched by DGXIII of
the European Commission, responsible for telecommunications and the
information market. Info2000 called for multi-national,
public-private sector partnerships with imaginative projects to
exploit public sector information.

EUAN is about opening up access to archives across the European
Union. The underlying vision is that a citizen should be able, using
Internet, to get information about the contents of the national
archives of another country of the Union.  At present geographical,
language and cultural barriers impede this.

The archives of the partners contain a wealth of information from
the 11th century to the 20th, ranging from government files to
collections of private papers of prominent individuals, from records
of the Socialist International to registers of property rights in
Scotland and from Swedish diplomatic correspondence to the records
of the Allied Control Commission for Italy.  The project will open
up access to the top level catalogues of all these records.

EUAN will examine both archival questions: how to ensure consistent
description independent of language, and information technology
questions: how to navigate between different computer systems.  The
project will produce a prototype user interface together with
reports and guidelines on promoting further European standardisation
in these areas.

The EUAN partners are:
the National Archives of Scotland (co-ordinator) 
the National Archives of Sweden
the National Archives of Italy
the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam 
Scottish Archive Network Ltd
EUAN is an inclusive rather than exclusive project and dissemination and 
sharing of results will go far beyond the consortium partners.

The project, which is expected to begin in January1999 and run for 2
years, is worth approximately 0.5 million ECUs (about USD 0.5
million) of which around half will be contributed by the EC.

EUAN will be run in close partnership with other European
initiatives, including another archive project selected in Info2000,
the European Visual Archive (EVA). It will also work closely with
international archival bodies including the ICA committees on
Information Technology and on Descriptive Standards, and will
complement the Swiss initiative to provide a common Internet gateway
for European archive websites.


For further information contact:
George MacKenzie  (the National Archives of Scotland, 
Edinburgh EH1 3YY  United Kingdom/ Royaume Uni
Tel: +44 131 535 1313 or 1382; 
Fax +44 131 535 1360; 
<gmackenz@sro.gov.uk>