EUAN is a project for the Info2000 initiative launched by DGXIII of the European Commission, responsible for telecommunications and the information market. Info2000 projects are multi-national, public-private sector partnerships which exploit public sector information. EUAN is about opening up access to archives across the European Union. The underlying vision is that a citizen should be able, using Internet, to get information about the contents of the national archives of another country of the Union. At present geographical, language and cultural barriers impede this. The archives of the partners contain a wealth of information from the 11th century to the 20th, ranging from government files to collections of private papers of prominent individuals, from records of the Socialist International to registers of property rights in Scotland and from Swedish diplomatic correspondence to the records of the Allied Control Commission for Italy. The project will open up access to the top level catalogues of all these records. EUAN will examine both archival questions: how to ensure consistent description independent of language, and information technology questions: how to navigate between different computer systems. The project will produce a prototype user interface together with reports and guidelines on promoting further European standardisation in these areas. The EUAN partners are: the National Archives of Scotland (co-ordinator) the National Archives of Sweden the National Archives of Italy the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam Scottish Archive Network Ltd EUAN is an inclusive rather than exclusive project and dissemination and sharing of results will go far beyond the consortium partners. The project, which will begin in January 1999 and run for 2 years, is worth approximately 0.5 million ECUs (about £0.3 million) of which around 0.24 millions will be contributed by the EC. EUAN will be run in close partnership with other European initiatives, including another archive project selected in Info2000, the European Visual Archive (EVA). It will also work closely with international archival bodies including the ICA committees on Information Technology and on Descriptive Standards, and will complement the Swiss initiative to provide a common Internet gateway for European archives. Links: UNESCO archives pages European Archives Network (Initiative of the Swiss Federal Archives)   Contact : George MacKenzie, The National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh EH1 3YY, United Kingdom Tel +44 131 535 1313 or 1382; Fax +44 131 535 1390; e-mail : gmackenz@nas.gov.uk