Tools & helper files Archives Hub

URL: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk

Description:  

The Archives Hub is a gateway to UK archives for education and research. Nearly 200 institutions have their archives represented on the service. Over 23,000 collection-level descriptions are included, with many descriptions also including item-level content.

Encoding Procedure:  

Participating institutions send EAD-encoded descriptions to the central service team at the University of Manchester. There is an online ISAD(G)/EAD editor at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/eadeditor or repositories can create their own EAD files, following the Archives Hub guidelines at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/datacreation.

Delivery Mechanism:  

The Archives Hub uses the Cheshire3 software to deliver its finding aids. This provides Web, SRU and Z39.50 interfaces to indexes of EAD2002 XML files as well as access via OAI-PMH. The EAD is converted on the fly to HTML for display to end-users of the web interface. The Archives Hub is distributed, so a number of institutions are 'Spokes', running their own instance of the Hub sofware. The Spokes software provides a customisable local web interface an EAD Editor and also Z39.50 and SRU access to the files.

The Archives Hub gathers information from the Spokes when they are updated. A central index is created from all the indexes of the data held centrally and from the Spokes. Users' searches are then directed (using SRU) only to those Spokes whose records will match.

Contact:  

Jane Stevenson jane.stevenson@manchester.ac.uk

RLG Member:  

No

Last updated: April 15, 2010

Update information:
If any information concerning the above EAD implementation is incorrect or out of date download the XML source file for this entry, make required changes and mail back to Mark Matienzo. Updated entries may only be submitted by the contact listed above.