The Archives Hub is a
Jisc
Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research, as well as the public sector. Its head office is based in Bristol with ...
service,
and is freely available to all. It provides a cross-search of descriptions of archives held across the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
, in over 400 institutions, including universities, colleges, specialist repositories, charities, businesses and other institutions.
It includes over 1,000,000 descriptions of archive materials on all manner of subjects, which represents over 30,000 archive collections. It also describes content available through topic-based websites, often created as a result of digitisation projects.
The Hub does not hold archives. Rather, it maintains
finding aids
A finding aid, in the context of archival science and archival research, is an organization tool, a document containing detailed and processed metadata and other information about a specific collection of records within an archive. Finding aids ...
, which help researchers to locate archives, by enabling them to search across descriptions. Each description provides a direct email link to the contact details for the repository that holds the archive. It enables researchers to search and filter by various criteria including keyword, title, creator, person, organisation, subject and date in order to bring together archives held all over the country that relate to a topic. It includes images and links to digital content, and enables filtering by digital or non-digital content. Descriptions can be navigated via a table of contents and a "search within" function.
Contributors provide new and updated descriptions regularly, so the service is constantly updated with descriptions of archives that have been newly catalogued and made available for research.
The Archives Hub has supporting information for researchers, including an introductory guide. It publishes monthly features, created by contributors, on all manner of subjects, people and organisations, to showcase the variety of archival content described.
The Archives Hub has an ethos based on
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...
and "making the data work harder". The Hub has recently developed "micro sites", which are repository interfaces available to higher education institutions wanting their own search application for descriptions stored on the Hub. It also provides data to the Archives Portal Europe.
Descriptions on the Hub are standards-based, using
ISAD(G), the international archival standard, and other standards for data such as languages, dates and index terms standards.
[Encoded Archival Description
Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is a standard for encoding descriptive information regarding archival records.Pitti, D (2012). "Encoded Archival Description (EAD)". In Bates, Marcia J., (ed.) ''Understanding Information Retrieval Systems: Manage ...]
), which is XML for archives. The site provides information for archivists and other cataloguers on online discovery, data creation, the use of standards, metadata and protocols for