ARIADNE and UNIMATRIX: Infrastructure and Standards of Recent German Archival Information Systems

Over the past 5 years German archives have undertaken numerous digital archive projects to provide access to their holdings. Web presentations such as HADIS, Ariadne or BAM, to name some of the larger projects, and several single archival institutions vary in their goals and technical specifications by making their metadata accessible through the Internet. On the one hand these projects use a wide variety of system designs and metadata formats to organize, describe and provide electronic access to their holdings. However, on the other hand, it is a great advantage for German archives that they traditionally maintain a high degree of standardization concerning the description of archival material and a well structured composition of archival finding aids.

The quantity of information and the number of archival information providers are increasing. This expansion makes it increasingly difficult for both researcher and user to keep track of the disparate information lanscape. At the present technical stage of information services for German archives on the World Wide Web, it is obvious to think of a federally coordinated and integrated Internet information service, based on a united and standardized platform. The realization of such an idea, from the presenters’ point of view, is closely connected to the development of a software solution. This will provide the possibility to integrate metadata from a wide range of existing archival database applications and to normalize this information in a formal, structured and semantical way. Finally, this will enable the delivery of a standardized and easily accessible outcoming datastream to be used in subsequent applications. The two projects – ARIADNE and UNIMATRIX – will be presented as steps toward a solution of these problems.

http://ariadne.uni-greifswald.de
http://unimatrix.uni-greifswald.de

Handout (MS Word)