(Introduction to ABSCH, Min Requirements, Getting Help: see Articles)

About National Contacts

To publish records in the ABSCH, you are required to fill out a common format, which is a standardized form to facilitate submission of information in a harmonized manner. These common formats, in the case of many national records, include the possibility to link to a national contact.

A national contact is not a stand-alone national record in the ABSCH, but it can be used to provide information on individuals and organizations that is published through other national records. Each national contact you save is added to a list of contacts that is shared among all national users for your country. When publishing national records for your country, you can link to any national contact previously added to your list of contacts. Since national contacts only appear publicly in the ABSCH, when they are published in other national records, they can be created by either the publishing authority or a national authorized user.

NOTE: Before you starting entering information on any new national record form that asks you to provide contact information, first ensure that the relevant national contact record has already been created. If not, use this guide to create a national contact.

Alternatively, if you find out that a relevant contact is not in the list once you have already started filling out a form, you can save the form as a draft and use this guide to create a new national contact. Once you’re done, you can return to your draft to add the newly created contact.

How to create a new National Contact in the ABSCH

(Step 1 and 2: see Article)

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Click on the Contacts (CON) link to load the list page displaying all contact records.

Step 3: Fill out the online form

• Add or edit a record

To create a new contact, click on the Add New button at the top right of the CNA panel to open the submission form. To edit an existing record click the “edit” icon associated with that record. Fields that are mandatory are marked with an asterisk (*)

Note: To avoid adding duplicates, you may check if the contact doesn’t already exist in the list of published national contacts.

• Add contact information for a person or organization

National contacts are made up of two categories: people and organizations. You will be asked to indicate if the contact is a person or an organization under the section Contact Type. You can then fill in the submission form with all the information requested. Certain fields are mandatory and indicated with an asterisk (*). It is also important to note that you can input your record in any of the six official UN languages.

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Creating records for several people within the same organization. If you want to create national contact records for several people working in the same organization, you can avoid duplication by first publishing a record for the organization. Afterwards, you can create records for individuals working in the organization and link them directly to the record of the organization (as shown in the screenshot below).

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Here you can link the contact person to an already published contact organization

Here you can select the National Contact type

Step 4: Review

Once you have entered all contact information, click on Review at the top of the form to check that all the mandatory fields have been completed. This will highlight any missing information that must be completed before the National Contact can be published. If all the mandatory fields have been filled out correctly, the message “the document is valid” will appear.

Step 5: Publish

You can click on Publish and the National Contact will be available to be linked to other national records. Please note that National Contacts are not publicly displayed in the ABSCH as stand-alone records, which means that unlike the other types of national records, they can be published directly by nationally authorized users without the approval of the publishing authority. However, national contacts will only be displayed publicly if they are linked to other published national records (which do need the approval of the publishing authority).

(Thank you:see Article)