The APEx project existed of a European collaboration between 33 archival and research organisations from 30 countries and a growing over eighty-five hundreds participating and content providing archives, including the Historical Archives of the European Union.
This makes APEx the biggest cooperation project in Europe. This project is a very good example of what can be achieved when institutions work together with a common goal and a shared vision on how to best service users. The APEx project is also by far the largest cooperation in the archival domain in Europe. The result being the portal APE, giving users a single point of online access to the greatest amount of European archival metadata ever. To accomplish this achievement the project partners performed an enormous amount of work by establishing and strengthening the network of the European archives institutes forming a tight collective, which allowed them to expand the network of content providers. Especially due to the country managers network, the backbone of the collective, the projects content providers increased resulting in much more content in APE leading to more users of the Archives Portal Europe.
Cooperation with Europeana
The archive collective will continue the aggregation towards the Europeana portal and work with Europeana to overcome the different organisational, cultural and technical problems relating to the presentation of Archival metadata in Europeana. The outcome of this APEx – Europeana cooperation so far had led to APEx being the first content provider to Europeana to deliver data in fully hierarchical Europeana Data Model. Also is APEx the biggest archival content provider and one of the biggest overall aggregators to Europeana, giving the archival sector a solid place in the online access point to European culture and history.
The cooperation with Europeana will not stop with the ending of the APEx project, but will be continued by APEF, an expert hub in the Europeana Digital Service Infrastructure and due to combining forces with other cultural heritage institutions and organisations. APEF will also go on with the APEx motto ‘reaching out to the outside (Cultural) world’, where they are in touch with various other projects, within the digital archival field and user groups to further expand the network around the Archives Portal Europe Foundation with new voices and perspectives. Read more.