About EAD:


Background on the metadata, i.e., what community developed it, why it was developed, when it was developed.

Led by Daniel Pitti, EAD was developed by librarians and computer scientists at Berkeley to be a machine-readable metadata tool for archives, manuscript collections, and museums. From its inception, EAD has been designed to be accessible from the internet. The fathers and mothers of EAD had the following five hopes for their child: "1) ability to present extensive and interrelated descriptive information found in archival finding aids, 2) ability to preserve the hierarchical relationships existing between levels of description, 3) ability to represent descriptive information that is inherited by one hierarchical level from another, 4) ability to move within a hierarchical informational structure, and 5) support for element-specific indexing and retrieval."

The founders of EAD chose SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) for their language. SGML was chosen because different programs (ie, machines) would be able to read it, which was the whole point of EAD. SGML's power comes from its use of DTD (Document Type Definition) tags. By forcing archivists creating EAD entries to use tags like "<>", EAD is universally consistent.

As mentioned previously, EAD was developed for museums too, but it has really only caught on with archivists. Museums have their own separate metadata schemes. In 1995/1996 the Society of American Archivists made EAD their official metadata scheme.

Links to the Web Site that maintains the standard & information about the maintaining organization

A division of the LOC maintains EAD.

What elements are included in the scheme?

EAD has always had elements like title, author, and date of creation. Since EAD is primarily for archives, there is a special archival description element, . The newest EAD system has information like language and Materials Specific Details .

One useful feature of EAD is that it has tags for title, emphasis, and foreign words.

What projects are using the scheme?

The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections and its members collections are an example.

Significant readings & discussions about the scheme (articles, web sites, books, blogs, listservs)

There are a number of websites affiliated with the SAA and the LOC dedicated to EAD. I already mentioned the official EAD page, so here are a few more:

EAD receiving a best practices award from the Research Libraries

EAD report card.

The EAD listserv

This website is my personal favorite. Its language is very clear:

EAD site

Your opinion on the usefulness of the scheme and why

I have not even used MARC, so I concede that I may not have a solid basis for judging EAD. However, since EAD is so widely used, and it now starts with the well-known SGML format, I think it is an attractive system for any archive that does not have PastPerfect.

EAD - the archivist's friend

Introduction:

The topic of my blog is going to be Encoded Archival Description - EAD. The reason I am choosing EAD over a wide variety of other metadata schemes is its practicality for me as an archivist. I feel that learning EAD will make me a better, more professional archivist and technology user. Since my historical society does not use EAD, mastering EAD can possibly benefit my historical society too.

My archival employer is the Jewish Historical Society of Metrowest. In terms of how active we are and how many people see our exhibits, we are possibly the best historical society in New Jersey. Our archives wing has a number of fascinating and unique collections, but (until very recently), we have been relatively primitive in our metadata. Up until this past week, when we installed PastPerfect on all of our computers, we used Microsoft Word to create finding aids.

Instead of complicated forms with HTML elements like:
bracket title /bracket
bracket creator /bracket
bracket date /bracket

We just list something's subject. For instance, Rabbi Solomon Foster's 3/14/1935 handwritten letter about Passover would just be keyworded as "1935 Passover letter." Since the letter would be with other document's by Solomon Foster, it would be unnecessary to create all those element fields.

We readily concede that our system is inferior to a proper archival metadata scheme. You could not look up every letter by Solomon Foster in our system. Our system's advantage is that it is extremely easy to use. Since we rely on (often elderly) volunteers to do most of our work, our system is necessary.

Very recently we installed PastPerfect on all our computers. PastPerfect is a program makes learning complicated metadata schemes unnecessary. With PastPerfect, making an EAD or Dublin Core record is just as easy as making a bibliography is with Noodlebib.