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.