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.