Today marks the public launch of Archivportal-D at the 84^th German Archive Conference. Freely accessible online at www.archivportal-d.de, the platform enables users to comb Germany’s archives in the course of their research and to do so free of charge. This in turn allows users to plan their research trips and visits to archives more efficiently.

Directly with the launch of the portal, users are already able to access over 5 million data sets from upwards of 25 participating archives and can view general information on another 400 institutions. The keen interest shown by many archives in feeding new material into the portal suggests that data volumes are set to increase sharply.

Archivportal-D contains online search tools relating to all manner of archival criteria. These include national vs. local historiography, ecclesiastical archives, business-and-industry archives, geographical or name-based filters, the accumulation of material over time, and earlier provenance (i.e. the origin of a particular archive’s content).

 

Golden Bull of Emperor Charles IV (Source: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg; CC-BY)

A host of treasures held in German archives can now be viewed digitally. One of these artefacts is the Golden Bull of Emperor Charles IV, the seminal constitutional document of the Holy Roman Empire and recently included on the UNESCO world documentary heritage list. Other examples include a caricature of Paul Hindemith drawn by the composer himself and emergency currency used in Magdeburg and depicting scenes from the history of the city.

Emergency currency used in Magdeburg (Quelle: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg; CC-BY)

Archivportal-D’s first sectorial-specific application uses data from the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. All archive information is fed to Archivportal-D via the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek’s open programming interface (API).

‘Archivportal-D demonstrates how well the DDB data can be passed on and how useful new applications are’, says Hermann Parzinger, spokesman of the Board of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek links data and objects from all depositories of culture – libraries, archives, museums, media libraries and conservation lists. Within the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Archivportal-D presents material in a new archival context:

‘Thanks to Archivportal-D we are able to provide a visual portrayal of the specific characteristics of archive material. It will be the main access point for archive-based research,’ declares Robert Kretzschmar, President of the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.

The data held in Archivportal-D are also made available to international platforms devoted to cultural heritage, such as Europeana or the Europa archive portal, and so opened up to an even wider public.

Since 2012 the portal has been developed and operated under the aegis of the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg in partnership with FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz-Institut für Informationsinfrastruktur GmbH, the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Sächsisches Staatsarchiv and the Archives School Marburg. The joint project receives funding from the German Research Foundation.

Launch of Archivportal-D at the opening of the 84^th German Archive Conference

Wednesday 24^th September 2014, 6.30pm – 8pm, Messe Magdeburg, Hall 2, Großer Saal