THE PROJECT

Danish private archives from a variety of persons, societies, organizations, institutions, businesses, shops etc. are collected and preserved by a great number of cultural institutions. This ensures fairly comprehensive coverage at the collecting stage, but may make it more difficult for users quickly to get a general view of the existing material and to identify the institution(s) in possession of the required material.

The Private Archives Committee, founded by the Danish Ministry of Cultural Affairs, has established as a high priority its desire to promote access to this valuable accumulation of knowledge within multiple repositories documenting private organizations and lives in Denmark.

A special appropriation by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs has, in 1999, enabled the Private Archives Committee to prepare DANPA, DAnmarks Nationale PrivatArkivdatabase. DANPA is national in scope. The database contains search capabilities for descriptive records representing approximately 80,000 private archives in Denmark. These bibliographic records are available to the public via the Internet. See Om arkiverne (About the archives) for a list of contributing archival institutions and the numerous private archives' repositories (currently only available in Danish).

The project has not endeavoured to create one uniform descriptive standard for all entries. Therefore, the content and structure of individual entries are dependent upon the standards of the repository supplying the description. Project archivists do hope, however, that the project will serve as a catalyst for further standardization of Danish archival description in digital media.

As part of the project, a report has been published, detailing the results and a proposal for the establishment of a permanent national private archives database, including the responsibility for controlling and maintaining the database. 
Med baggrund i erfaringerne fra første fase er der i 2001 til 2002 lavet forbedringer i funktionalitet og design. Desuden er der indhentet nye data fra de hidtidige deltagere og fra en række nye arkiver. Databasen indeholder nu oplysninger om ca. 120.000 privatarkiver. 

BACKGROUND

In 1995/1996 the Private Archives Committee carried out a pilot project in order to investigate the possibilities for pooling data from various registration bases for private archives in a joint database and for making the collected material searchable. Data to be used for this purpuse were supplied by the ARKIBAS databases in, at the time, approximately 80 local archives, by databases for private archival collections in the State Archives as well as The Royal Library's Collection of Manuscripts and, finally, by project databases for societies' archives etc. The pilot project made more than 40,000 archives searchable and documented great possibilites for pooling various registration data. And this provided the basis for the present project on a bigger scale. 

PROJECT ORGANIZATION