The State Archives holds a real treasure of cartographic materials, but handing out original maps and plans in the reading rooms bears the risk of deteriorating the state of conservation of these documents. Indeed, repeated unrolling and rolling-up of these maps and plans that are sometimes of considerable size has taken its toll on the documents, which called for a large-scale digitization campaign. In recent years, some 60,000 maps and plans were digitised. This number increases steadily. Roughly 44,000 of these digital images have been processed and are now available for research.
In order to reuse some elements of the State Archives' IT infrastructures for the needs of the future data archive, a mapping between Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and Encoded Archival Description (EAD) was developed. This crosswalk will enable the State Archives of Belgium to feature metadata pertaining to social science datasets in its online catalogues. The mapping is introduced in a paper published by the International Association for Social Sciences Information Services & Technology (IASSIST) in its open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal, IASSIST Quarterly.
