The EU-funded APEx project - The Archives Portal Europe network of excellence - APEx - is a European-based Best Practice Network project aiming at expanding, enriching, enhancing and sustaining the Archives Portal Europe.
The Archives Portal Europe is the single online access point to an ever growing network of European archives, allowing us to gain an easily accessible insight into our shared European cultural provenance and progression.
APEx is the joint effort of the already participating European archives and those archival institutions yet to become partners which are expanding the Archives Portal Europe and gets the archival landscape in shape for the quickly advancing digital future of our society.
The creation of this Foundation marks the last phase of . It must ensure that the Archives Portal Europe can subsist and can be further developed.
APEF pursues the following goals by all means in its powers:
- Maintaining and managing the Archives Portal Europe by enriching, maintaining, updating, expanding and improving the accessibility of the (meta)data contained in the Archives Portal Europe;
- Maintaining and enhancing the infrastructure of the Archives Portal Europe for the benefit of its associates, content providers and users;
- Acting as (inter)national aggregator for the content of European archives to Europeana.
The Foundation has associates, which are European archives institutions that contribute to the proper functioning of the Foundation and thus fund the archives portal. Together, they constitute the Assembly of Associates that oversees the policy of the governing board and the general course of affairs of the Foundation.
Beside the users, the content providers are the most important stakeholders of the Foundation: they make available to the Archives Portal Europe the data and/or metadata from their archives, without this corresponding to an obligation to pay a contribution.
For further information about the goals of Archives Portal Europe and the modalities to become a content provider, please consult the website.