Tuesday 27 April 2021 – Marta Musso (KTH -Stockholm) – An Archival Repository of Archival Repositories: integrating metadata in Archives Portal Europe

This seminar is 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm BST, 27 April 2021. It will be livestreamed on YouTube at https://youtu.be/kItyonMn2jo

There is no need to register in advance, but you can sign up to our newsletter for a reminder email and direct livestream link.

Session chair: Tessa Hauswedell

Abstract: In 2002, the guidelines created by the ICA (International Council on Archives) and IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) indicated full digitisation and online availability of archival material as the main objective for archives in the digital age. Since 2009, in parallel with the creation of national or local research portals, countries around Europe have started to design a system to integrate these online spaces into a single catalogue that would allow to access Europe’s archival heritage through one single research portal. In 2012, after three years of research,  Archives Portal Europe (APE) was published as the online repository open to all institutions holding archival heritage about Europe. This paper aims to reconstruct the cultural and political background in which Archives Portal Europe was conceived and designed, and the issues (and solutions) offered to historians to conduct archival research online.

Biography: Marta Musso is a researcher in digital humanities and a historian. She studies the relation between economic actors, States, and international diplomacy, as well as new methods of historical research in a digital environment. She holds a PhD in economic history from the University of Cambridge, and in 2016/2017 she was Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She is currently the Research Manager of Archives Portal Europe, the online portal of European Archives, and she is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of History of Technology at KTH – Stockholm.