.

The APEnet project is now over but the work continues in the APEx project.

APEnet (Archives Portal Europe network) was a Best Practice Network project supported by the European Commission in the eContentplus programme. It ran from the 15th of January 2009 until the 15th of January 2012. Its objective was to build an Internet Gateway for Documents and Archives in Europe where seventeen European National Archives in close cooperation with the Europeana initiative were to create a common access point to European archival descriptions and digital collections. This website was intended to inform you about the development of this project.

The project successfully delivered the first version of the Archives Portal Europe on the 12th of January 2012, giving access to more than 14 million descriptive units (descriptions of archival records), contributed by 61 European archival institutions.

Shortly after the conclusion of the APEnet project, a follow-up project was started, the APEx project (Archives Portal Europe network of excellence), again funded by the European Commission, but this time in the ICT PSP programme.

The APEx project started on the 1st of March 2012 and will run until the 1st of March 2015 and it's main goal is to further develop the Archives Portal Europe infrastructure as well as to expand the network by getting more European countries on board and facilitating their regional and local archival institutions to contribute their content to the Archives Portal Europe as easy and comfortable as possible. This will at the same time enforce the portal's role as archives domain aggregator for Europeana. The APEx project has its own project website which you can reach over here: http://www.apex-project.eu.

On the 17th of January 2013 the APEx project already reached an important milestone: it launched a complete new version of the Archives Portal Europe on new servers and a new web-address: http://www.archivesportaleurope.net.

At the time of the launch of that new version 1.1 of the Archives Portal Europe, it already contained more than 20 million descriptive units, gathered by 85 European archival institutions, linked to more than 45 million digital archival objects.

So please continue to follow the continuation of the work of the APEnet project and to support it on the APEx project's website.