Implementing EAD: the experience of the NAHSTE project

Abstract

XML is increasingly being adopted by a number of professional bodies as an international, non-proprietary, platform independent methodology for structured mark-up of digital data. This facilitates electronic data exchange, data manipulation and searchable Internet delivery. In 1998 the Society of American Archivists published rules for XML use within the archival profession. This Document Type Definition (DTD), Encoded Archival Description (EAD), was a result of 3 years collaborative work by the EAD Working Group of the Committee on Archival Information Exchange. This has now become the profession's industry standard for collaborative cataloguing projects. Navigational Aids for the History of Science, Technology and the Environment (NAHSTE), funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP), was a collaborative project between three Higher Education Institutes. It mounted finding-aids to nearly 50 archives collections on the Internet. These were authored in native EAD. This paper will examine the processes undertaken by the archivist to enable the technical creation of these finding-aids and the methodologies employed by the web-developer to create their seamless hierarchical searchable delivery.

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