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.