BECome
a member
Who are you?
Join one of our teams
OPAN welcomes new members. We welcome new members to our bi-annual meetings (zoom or face to face). Collaboration = Sustainability. By joining forces through OPAN, we aim to build a formidable mosaic of open portal archives, share our practices, our experiences, and our code.
A quote from Klaus Mann can ground our purpose:
“Where does history begin? Where does our individual life begin? What adventures, what sunken passions have shaped our being? (...) Without a doubt, we have deeper roots than our conscience is willing to admit. Nothing and no-one exists independently. A universal rhythm determines our thoughts and our actions; the curve of our destiny is part of a formidable mosaic..”
We perceive this universal rhythm through the audiovisual archives we showcase on our platforms and in all the open archive portals we represent. As an international federation, OPAN aims to share with each other, but also bring our values and our work to a wider public, and to raise awareness of the interest and importance of private archives and local history. In doing so, we aim to build a formidable mosaic.
Federation and funding
Our Federation team seeks grant funding to support our initiatives.
InterOperability and Technology
Our Interoperability team is dedicated to project sustainability. We are sharing best practices, designs, and code, and working towards a common portal interface that will combine the best features from our individual portals into a single open source platform. Besides sustaining our own individual projects within our respective countries, our aim is to make it easier for new members in other countries to create their own place-based portals with our help and code. We are also exploring the possibility of creating a federated network, interlinking our shared portals and virtually reuniting photographs and the cultural heritage of place.
Communication & Promotion
Our goal is to communicate and promote what we are doing so that we can become more visible. To this end, we are presenting the OPAN project at conferences, developing a presence on linked in, and writing a monthly newsletter.