Study - Public Access
Study

Study on ensuring integrated access to publicly available documents from EU institutions, agencies and bodies

The PublicAccess.eu study was commissioned in order to obtain a wider insight into how different types of documents (legislative and administrative) from different EU institutions, agencies and bodies could be brought together in a single place for seamless and user-friendly access.

Unclassified documents from EU institutions, agencies and bodies are scattered across a large number of repositories, and they are made available to the citizens via multiple public registers and/or websites. Each organisation maintains its own repositories and outlets, making it impossible for the citizen to perform a single search in order to access a comprehensive range of EU documents on a given topic. In this context, the main objective of the study was to analyse the various scenarios that could be pursued in order to bring these documents and/or their metadata together in one location. The study covers the following aspects:

  • inventory and description of existing document repositories and outlets;
  • metadata compatibility of documents held in different repositories and outlets;
  • extent of metadata harmonisation needed to ensure integration of resources;
  • different options for the creation of integrated access infrastructure and their financial, technical and organisational implications.

Additional elements such as indexing and search were also analysed.

The study proposes four alternatives for potential integrated access solutions.

Click here to access the full text of the study

Click here to access the study as an e-book