Increase the usability of your archive

Your archive or collection is a valuable asset for your own organisation, but people from outside may also be interested in its content. Granting external access to your archive can greatly enhance its usability and add value.
In this article, you’ll learn:

• How can you ensure that people outside your organisation can also use your archive or collection?
• What should you consider regarding the rights to certain items in your archive or collection?

Taking care of your archive is one thing, but how do you ensure that not just you, but also others can use your archival content?

Discoverable and visible

First and foremost, it’s crucial that people can find your archive and collection. The content needs to be discoverable, and this can be achieved through descriptive data about your archive, but also through the (often digital) visibility of the archival content itself.

There are several places where you might consider making your archive and collections more discoverable to the public. For example:

• an archive section on your website or a separate archive website where you can display online archival content. Take a look at how DE SINGEL has approached this, or be inspired by Theatre aan Zee’s journey, which continues today at ertazeens.be.
• a general description of your archive at Archiefpunt, making it easier for people to track down your archive.

When making your archive available online, it’s important to have good metadata. A file that is saved somewhere without context is hard to find and will not give you much visibility. For audiovisual collections preserved by meemoo, metadata is crucial for bringing archival content to the right audience (e.g. within education) or enabling other forms of reuse. The creators of the StageTube pilot project, for instance, encountered a lack of metadata when trying to find suitable archival content for use in a documentary context.

Rights

Whether an archive or collection is usable or not also depends on the rights agreements around it. Before you can use it, the rights need to be cleared and held by the archive or collection manager. You can’t just use photos from a concert without permission, for example, even if you organised it yourself. And if the rights to these photos are unknown, you need to start by finding out to find out who holds them: the photographer or your organisation? You also need to consider other rights holders: the people depicted in the images. There is a good example of a workflow for clearing rights on the StageTube project page.