Improving online access to archival data

Archives are memory institutions whose mission is to preserve and provide access to a set of carefully selected, arranged and described documents to their users. Those users are usually specialists, and their usual way to find information is by means of "finding aids" usual- ly encoded in EAD standard. With the increased availability of archival holdings accessible on the Web, archives are widening the range of users, and the use of online finding aids has proved to be too complicated for the non-specialists. This paper is the synopsis of a Master Thesis, where a methodology has been developed to represent the information contained in finding aids with a different standard, namely EDM (Europeana Data Model), which is used by the Euro- peana and is becoming the de-facto standard for metadata interoperability. EDM allows a much more intuitive representation of the archive content and the possibility to access data from different access points.