Since the 2003 conference of the Society of American Archivists, archivists have been more willing to express their issues with Encoded Archival Description. At that conference, a session was held “Demystifying EAD" - three archivists shared ways that they had improved Encoded Archival Description. One had use a Word Macros to create the metadata and two others Access.

In 2004 EAD suffered a further blow when Elizabeth Yakel released a study that demonstrated that EAD-based finding aids were actually difficult to use. The subjects of the study were information science students at the University of Pittsburgh. The finding aids pertained to Pittsburgh History. Yakel’s study compellingly demonstrated that EAD finding aids were not easy for non-archivists to use. If information science students could not efficiently use EAD finding aids, then what about historians? What about the general public?

A conclusion from the Yakel study is that perhaps archivists have over focused on EAD metadata fields to the detriment of usability.

In common with other fields, there is a growing effort to make EAD more of an open-source application. A project called the Archivists Toolkit – led by NYU, with UC-San Diego and the Five Colleges of Los Angeles – has existed for several years to offer open source options for archivists. The project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

EAD’s Architecture: The Programming Itself


EAD formerly used SGML as its programming language. EAD’s version of SGML was much easier to use than MARC’s, since EAD’s tag names were derived intuitively from their function, whereas MARC’s are alphanumeric tags as random as phone numbers.

Compare:

Title in EAD - For Whom the Bell Tolls

Title in MARC - 245 04 $aFor Whom the Bell Tolls/

EAD is similarly easy for authors, places of publication, copyright. EG .

One can also use nested embeddings. If a title has a person’s name in it, one can use a name tag to tell the computer that a name is there.

A good feature of EAD is its hierarchical nature. The entire archival description, including the title, author, creator, etc is under a tag . For the inventory, one uses tags like

component first level.


The (Descriptive Information) is one of the most important sections for the archivist. Under the one enters information like and .




EAD’s problem is that it is overall difficult for computers to understand. EAD is less machine-readable than MARC and HTML. There really is no good browser for it so EAD switched to an XML DTD relatively recently.