Online access to archives – not longer just a dream!

Petra Rauschenbauch, German Federal Archive:
Using retro- conversion of finding aids and digitalisation of archival documents to achieve an all-embracing online presence of archives

The Federal Archive got the mission the give an online access to the fund of the first free elected chamber of the people („Volkskammer“) of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) on the occasion of it‘s anniversary . Very fast it was clear to the professional group within the archive that the old finding aids on paper record cards should therefore be converted and made accessible in the best possible way. The goal was to create an as easy and precise possible and also extensible system.

In a first step they digitalised over 150‘000 cards in collaboration with an external partner. Those cards were in very different conditions, some were written by machine, other manually, some of the were held together with paperclips. The conversion was done with the support of a software in which they integrated a set of rules and test plans (so depinding on the card, this could result in a fully digital up to a manual copy), all this was again followed by several error correction steps. Only because of that they could assure the demanded precision of 99.98 for the text and 100% for signatures.

The Federal Archives received the data finally in EAD and they integrated it in their MidosaXML-DTD. MidosaXML is the software they are using to prepare the data also for the online access.

The in this way digitalised finding aids can now at any time dynamically be corrected and annotated. The online access for the enduser is realised with a especially for this purpose programmed search engine called ARGUS. It allows to search in full text within the finding aids. This search engine is using EAD for the metadata und METS for the integration of the digitalised documents (those are created in another process from microfilm). You can check that out for yourself by going to www.bundesarchiv.de . Any feedback on this is always very welcomed by the Federal Archive.

Lessons learned from this project:

• Online access is a big success: Already 5.6 M page views in 2009
• More and more people cite directly from ARGUS. Thanks to that system the users of the Federal Archives could reduce their time in the archive buildings.
• With the online access they won also new type of public
• MEX evolved to MIDEX. Also MIDEX will be published as Open Source soon

The FR used the possibility to ask Mrs. Rauschenbach some more questions

FR: The Federal Archiv is a big institution with the accordant financial possiblities. How and what can smaller institutions learn from your experience?

P. Rauschenbach: I agree with you on that, the Federal Archive is indeed a huge institution. That‘s why we tried to bundle our projects for the future like we did with our competence centre for retroconversion. There we develop new techniques, test them to realise them in the field. The scientific officers can then bring their finding aids to the competence centre and receive them digitalised back.

For smaller archives we could imagine using federations to do it the same way. We could also think about creating a kind of portal for the conversion of finding aids. We already work with this approach in German states. The states could benefit here from the know- how of the Federal Archiv. They could send their finding aids for conversion in a competence center and received them digitalized in EAD back. It is then for the institutions to see what they want to do furthermore with that data (e.g. conversion into html to publish in the internet, integration in other software).

For the moment it is still the Federal Archive that is responsible for the network. Another idea in this context was also to develop those structures to a German archive portal. But we had to let go this idea later because of several reasons.

A new hope is the European archive portal. We hope that there will be a prototype by the end of the year. Unfortunately an integration into Europeana is not possible for the moment because we can not yet link the finding aids with the digitalised documents. But we are doing our best tackeling this issue and resolving it in a cooperative way.

A very important criterium for our own software development was always to publish it afterwards as Open Source for the general public. That software can and is already been used from institutions of smaller and middle size. MidosaXML can be bought at a very challenging price from the archive school of Marburg („Archivschule Marburg“). Included with the licence are all future updates and a documentation. With a tool like this, a institution can make the step to EAD with one mouse click and gets so very fast compatible. So you can at at later stage also change to use Midex.

FR: Language is especially for smaller institutions a very important issue. In which languages is this software available?

P. Rauschenbach: MidosaXML exists in a German, Spanish and Polish version. MEX only in a German and English Version (estate 2007).

FR: Another important issue especially for us Young Professionals are is the professional profile. Where should we make an effort in your opinion?

P. Rauschenbach: The most important thing nowadays is that archivists have to be very flexible persons. We are the longer the more confronted with digital finding aids and digital documents. Many processes in relation to those files are the more and more in charge of archivists. Especially big archives do their own software development and that is not only a job for IT people. The connections between information technology and archival science are rapidly growing.

I can give you an example to illustrate this: An archive for a smaller town in Germany advertised a job for an archivist but got no application. The only problem was, that the field of activities covered also digital records!
So it is high time to concentrate also on the records management and on the treatment of digital data.

Jürg Schlegel (Text und Übersetzung vom Deutschen)