Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
A finding aid is a document containing detailed information about a specific collection of papers or records within an archive. They are used by researchers to determine whether information within a collection is relevant to their research...
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
The Society of American Archivists is the oldest and largest archivist association in North America, serving the educational and informational needs of more than 5,000 individual and institutional members...
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. The project's goal was to create a standard for describing collections held by archive
Archive
An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...
In library science, special collections is the name applied to a specific repository or department, usually within a library, which stores materials of a "special" nature, including rare books, archives, and collected manuscripts...
MARC, MAchine-Readable Cataloging, is a data format and set of related standards used by libraries to encode and share information about books and other material they collect...
for describing regular books. Such a standard enables museum
Museum
A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...
s, libraries, and manuscript repositories to list and describe their holdings in a manner that would be machine-readable and therefore easy to search, maintain, exchange. Since its inception many special collections
Special collections
In library science, special collections is the name applied to a specific repository or department, usually within a library, which stores materials of a "special" nature, including rare books, archives, and collected manuscripts...
and archives have adopted it.
In addition to the development and maintenance work done by the Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress, the Research Libraries Group
Research Libraries Group
The Research Libraries Group was a U.S.-based library consortium which developed the Eureka interlibrary search engine, the RedLightGreen database of bibliographic descriptions and ArchiveGrid, a database containing descriptions of archival collections...
(RLG) has developed and published a set of "Best Practices" implementation guidelines for EAD, which lays out mandatory, recommended, and optional elements and attributes. RLG has also provided a kind of clearinghouse for finding aids in EAD format, known as ArchiveGrid
ArchiveGrid
ArchiveGrid is a subscription-only database containing nearly a million descriptions of archival collections from all over the world. Historical documents, personal papers, manuscripts and family histories are described and cataloged by librarians and archivists...
. Member libraries provide RLG the URL for their finding aids; RLG automatically harvests data from the finding aids, indexes it, and provides a search interface for the index, thus giving researchers the ability to search across several hundred institutions' collections with a single query. RLG also has developed the "RLG Report Card," an automated quality-checking program that will analyze an EAD instance and report any areas where it diverges from the best practices guidelines.
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
and elsewhere have adopted and implemented EAD with varying levels of technical sophistication. A list of implementors is available here. Perhaps the most ambitious effort is the Online Archive of California, a union catalog
Union catalog
A union catalog is a combined library catalog describing the collections of a number of libraries. Union catalogs have been created in a range of media, including book format, microform, cards and more recently, networked electronic databases...
of over 5000 EAD finding aids covering manuscripts and images from institutions across the state.
Document Type Definition is a set of markup declarations that define a document type for SGML-family markup languages...
(DTD) specifies the elements to be used to describe a manuscript collection as well as the arrangement of those elements (for example, which elements are required, or which are permitted inside which other elements). EAD 1.0 was an SGML DTD; EAD 2002, the second and current incarnation of EAD, was finalized in December 2002 and is an XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
DTD. The EAD tag set has 146 elements and is used both to describe a collection as a whole, and also to encode a detailed multi-level inventory of the collection. Many EAD elements have been, or can be, mapped to content standards (such as DACS
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Describing Archives: A Content Standard is a set of rules for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections. The descriptive standard can be utilized for all types of archival material...
ISAD defines the elements that should be included in an archival finding aid. It was approved by the International Council on Archives as a standard to register archival documents produced by corporations, persons and families.-History:After initial activities since 1988 supported by UNESCO, a...
) and other structural standards (such as MARC or Dublin Core
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...
Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together . The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to...
of the data.
eadheader
The first section of an EAD-encoded finding aid is the eadheader. This section contains the title and optional subtitle of the collection and detailed information about the finding aid itself: who created it, when it was created, its revision history, the language the finding aid is written in, and so on. The eadheader itself has a number of required attributes that map to various ISO standards such as ISO 3166-1
ISO 3166-1
ISO 3166-1 is part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization , and defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. The official name of the standard is Codes for the representation of names...
ISO 8601 Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times is an international standard covering the exchange of date and time-related data. It was issued by the International Organization for Standardization and was first published in 1988...
for date formats.
The eadheader and its child elements can be mapped to other standards for easy interchange of information. They are often mapped to Dublin Core elements such as Creator, Author, Language. For example, in the excerpt below the relatedencoding="DC" attribute of the eadheader element specifies that child elements will be mapped to Dublin Core; the child element indicates that the EAD element maps to the Dublin Core element .
Example of an eadheader:
dateencoding="iso8601" langencoding="iso639-2b"
relatedencoding="DC" repositoryencoding="iso15511"
scriptencoding="iso15924"> bachrach_lf Louis Fabian Bachrach Papers An inventory of his papers at Blank University Mary Smith
Blank University 1981
John Jones 13 Sep 2006
English
archdesc
The archdesc section contains the description of the collection material itself. First, the Descriptive Identification or did element contains a description of the collection as a whole, including the creator (which may be an individual or an organization), size (usually given in linear feet), inclusive dates, language(s), and an abstract
Abstract (summary)
An abstract is a brief summary of a research article, thesis, review, conference proceeding or any in-depth analysis of a particular subject or discipline, and is often used to help the reader quickly ascertain the paper's purpose. When used, an abstract always appears at the beginning of a...
or brief description. As with the eadheader above, elements may be mapped to correspondeing standards; elements in this section are usually mapped to MARC elements. For example, in the excerpt below the relatedencoding="MARC21" attribute of the archdesc element specifies that child elements will be mapped to MARC21; the child element indicates that the unittitle element maps to MARC field 245, subfield a.
Example:
Overview of the Collection Blank University Brightman, Samuel C. (Samuel Charles), 1911-1992
Samuel C. Brightman Papers 1932-1992 6 linear ft.
Papers of the American journalist including some war correspondence,
political and political humor writings, and adult education material
2458163 English
Several additional descriptive elements may follow the did including:
bioghist - biographic description of the person or organization
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
description of the collection material
relatedmaterial - description of items which the repository acquired separately but which are related to this collection, and which a researcher might want to be aware of
separatedmaterial - items which the repository acquired as part of this collection but which have been separated from it, perhaps for special treatment, storage needs, or cataloging
controlaccess - a list of subject headings or keywords for the collection, usually drawn from an authoritative source
Controlled vocabulary
Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other form of knowledge organization systems...
The Library of Congress Subject Headings comprise a thesaurus of subject headings, maintained by the United States Library of Congress, for use in bibliographic records...
or the Art and Architecture Thesaurus
accessrestrict and userestrict - statement concerning any restrictions on the material in the collection
The second, and usually largest, section of the archdesc is the dsc, which contains a full inventory of the collection broken down into progressively smaller intellectual chunks. EAD offers two options: the c element which can be nested within itself to an unlimited level, and a set of numbered container elements c01 through c12 which can only be nested numerically (i.e. a c01 can contain only a c02; a c02 can contain only a c03, and so on). Note that the c and c0# elements refer to intellectual subdivisions of the material; the actual physical container is specified using the container element. The inventory may go down to as detailed a level as desired. The example below shows an inventory to the folder level.
