Objectives

The church registers of the individual religious communities are among the most used and best explored historical sources of all. And it is hardly surprising as anyone is surely directly affected and may become a potential user. As a consequence of this increasing demand, the record-keeping archives are facing considerable challenges in terms of provision of records, usage, logistics and preservation.

Modern means of information technology, however, allow for new and innovative strategies to meet those challenges, which in turn create completely new perspectives for the researchers.

Our portal represents an up-to-date offering provided by all participating archives with the following objectives:

• To facilitate easy access to the documents
• To provide new perspectives for science and genealogy
• To provide additional basic information for more efficient research
• To link information across denominations, religions and borders
• To offer a multitude of services (research, reading support, reproductions)
• To integrate web-2.0-services for the indexing of documents in terms of content into databases

At present the website is undergoing a pilot project phase during which we aim to gather experiences and collect information about the demands of our users. We are therefore pleased to receive feedback of any kind to matricula@icar-us.eu.