Finding and Accessing the Right Archive and Archival Data. Archival Tools to Support Research and to Make Archives Available to Public

"Strategien der Suche nach Archiven und Archivdaten. Neue Instrumente der Unterstutzung von Forschern und der Erleichlerung des Archivzugangs fur breitere Nutzergruppen." Archival institutions have been characterized as the arks of knowledge. This is quite right as they preserve data which are dated in the later past but still valuable in nowadays. Before the development of computer technologies, archival institutions had to cope with the immense amount of information they had to record and classify and also create finding aids so as to help users find what they needed, without any automation. So, the archival institutions did not have the chance to promote their work and they had been usually identified with chaos and specialized users, who only them knew the archives' secrets. Hopefully, the computers' evolution, slowly gave the chance to archives to work faster and preserve a lot of information, in various forms, other than paper.