Janus is a self-funded project, established in October 2002 to provide a single point of networked access to catalogues of archives and manuscript collections held throughout Cambridge. The number and range of participating repositories - both University and non-University - continues to widen, promising in due course the near comprehensive coverage of archives in the city and surrounding area. In August 2006, respositories number 30 and multi-level catalogues 1500.
Janus accepts descriptions of archives encoded as EAD from which it extracts data and loads them into a database. Web pages are created dynamically by extracting information from the database which might come from more than one collection. The site allows users to search the database, or to just browse records.
The majority of participating repositories use an automated EAD ouput routine to produce files for publication on Janus. The output routine is part of a ISAD(G)compliant, hierarchical cataloguing tool developed locally using the Microsoft Access application. Others use an online form on the Janus website or markup their word processed catalogues 'by hand'. Index terms are included in each EAD instance and become part of the Janus database at upload. The Janus webserver includes parsing software among its suite of tools to check uploaded files are encoded in acceptable EAD before publication.