A potential visitor or a multimedia publisher will have the perspective to look at informa-tion of a great number of archives in one glimpse. The public archival collections from the partners have value beyond their use by the regional public and their wider availability would be beneficial both to the general public and to private industry, with European and world-wide interest . In this project the public archives will allow their basic information materials to be used by the general public and exploited by the multimedia industry through electronic information services. Deliberately a choice has been made of regional archives next to national ones, to be able to find out about the diversity of the standards used, the directories and inventories available, the conditions required for access, exchange and coordination. This way the project will tell a good deal about cultural diversity from the countries or regions.
Archives are repositories for information of historic interest.
Therefore archives constitute an important part of the cultural heritage of European importance and play an important role in the participation and improvement of the knowledge of the history and culture of the European regions and communities. Major changes in the last 150 years that influenced living or working conditions and family life, the effects of the war, the urbanisation of many of our regions, the great migrations or educational projects are all phenomenon's that are of general interest to the public. As centres and repositories of documentation, objects or information there are similarities between museums, libraries and public archives. Still archives have a characteristic property. Not only do archives describe each collection and individual documents whatever its form or format is, but they give also content and context information.