Representing archival data in the Cendari project 

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CENDARI (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure) is a European research project whose main goal is to integrate digital archives and resources for research on medieval and modern European history. It aims at building a virtual research environment and providing researchers with tools which will allow users to visualize, customize, annotate their own research outcomes and more generally generate content on the platform. The emphasis is on being an infrastructure of research (rather than for research) with a focus on end-users: historians.

The following main challenges that we faced in this project will be presented: - variety of metadata standards and the importance of data interoperability - cooperation of different communities (historians and computer scientists, but also archivists, librarians and museum curators) - transnational and interdisciplinary approach - multilingualism and diversity of media types (written sources, moving images, images and sound)