The annual meeting of the Archives Portal Europe was organized at the National Archives of Sweden on June 2 and 3, 2026. Slobodan Mandić, archival councilor, participated in the meeting as a representative of Serbia and the Historical Archives of Belgrade. After useful discussions with members of the Foundation's board of directors, the sessions discussed current events from various European archives, new ideas for future joint activities, as well as technical aspects of the development of the portal and the future of the application of international professional standards.
The beginnings of the Archives Portal Europe date back to 2009, when the process of creating a common European archival system was initiated with the goal to connect the virtual spaces of different institutions into a single catalogue. The resulted was the Archives Portal Europe, launched in 2012, as an online repository for European archival catalogues.
Although it applies international archival standards for describing archival materials, this portal actually only stores metadata and links to digital objects (scans of documents) in existing databases. As a result, users have been given the opportunity to search an extremely large amount of information about archival materials in a centralized place – over 280 million units of document descriptions originating from about 7,000 institutions, from more than 30 countries and in over 20 different languages.