The Archives Hub is a national gateway providing free access to descriptions of archives and manuscript collections held in UK universities and colleges.
The Archives Hub is a free resource.
Content description
The Archives Hub provides a single point of access to 19,828 descriptions of archives held in more than 150 UK universities and colleges. At present these are primarily at collection level, although complete catalogue descriptions are provided where they are available. The Archives Hub forms one part of the UK's National Archives Network, alongside related networking projects.
An important aspect of the work of the Archives Hub is to provide training and advice on issues relating to electronic cataloguing of archives. The 'For Archivists' section of the website contains a wealth of information about using XML and EAD for archive catalogues, as well as details of forthcoming training courses in areas of interest to those responsible for archives.
A Steering Committe - which includes representatives of contributing institutions, the National Archives, and the other archive networks - guides the progress of the project. There is also a Contributors' and Users' Forum which provides feedback to aid the development of the service.
The service is hosted at MIMAS on behalf of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) and is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Systems development work is undertaken at the University of Liverpool.
For news and latest additions to the archives, see: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/
Main subject areas
Multi-disciplinary
Academic level
A-level, undergraduate, postgraduate.
Date range
Mediaeval to present day (some prehistoric items, too!)
Updates
Around 100 new collection descriptions are added each month. New records from contributors are added to the Archives Hub on a regular basis. Users can also receive information about these by subscribing to the Hub's 'Latest Additions' news feed.
Publisher's selection policy
The criteria for inclusion in the service are the following:
- The collection must be held in a UK university or college that is funded by one of the funding councils.
- The collection must be available for use by researchers in further and higher education.
Subscription and licensing terms
Functionality and standards compliance
Full text linking
OpenURL full text linking is not available with this resource.
Federated searching
The Archives Hub is accessible through Z39.50. Details of this service are available at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/z3950.shtml
MARC records
MARC records are not currently available.
Metadata standards
Metadata records are in EAD2002 format.
Search options
The Quick Search targets areas of archival description likely to be most useful for a general search, including the title, subjects, biographical or historical information, scope and context information, and general notes.
Browse Indexes to browse the hub's indexes of collection titles, subjects, place names, corporate names, and personal names.
Subject Finder allows users to input a single subject term to see related subjects from the indexes.
The Advanced Search allows searching by the following criteria: keyword, personal name, corporate name, place name, subject heading, data, reference number and repository. Users can also do a full text search.
Post-search options
Registered users can save descriptions and email batches of descriptions to themselves.
Usage statistics
Statistics are not COUNTER compliant: quarterly information is sent to the JISC Monitoring Unit at http://www.mu.jisc.ac.uk/servicedata/mimas/data/index.html
Authentication
ATHENS
Accessibility
The Archives Hub meets WAI Priority 2: http://jarmin.com/accessibility/techniques/wai2.html
Library support information