Encoded Archival Description
[2] For these reasons, archival description involves a hierarchical and progressive analysis that emphasizes the intellectual structure and content of the collection and does not always extend to the level of individual items within it.
[1] Work on an encoding standard for archival description began in 1992 at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1998 the first version of EAD was released.
[1] Through a standardized system for encoding the descriptions of archival finding aids, EAD allows users to locate primary sources that are geographically remote.
[8] EAD3 was revised in 2018 to address concerns relating to the ease of access to archival descriptions and its ability to interface with other systems.
[3] Archival description, by contrast, represents a collection, or a fonds, often containing individual items of various media, sharing a common origin, or provenance.
[15] The unique nature of archival records and the geographic distribution of individual collections has presented a challenge for those wishing to locate and access them for over 150 years.
[13] EAD originated at the 1993 Society of American Archivists annual meeting in New Orleans and was headed by Daniel Pitti at the University of California, Berkeley.
[17] Such a standard enables archives, museums, libraries, and manuscript repositories to list and describe their holdings in a manner that would be machine-readable and therefore easy to search, maintain and exchange.
Member libraries provide RLG the URL for their finding aids; RLG automatically harvests data from the finding aids, indexes it, and provides a search interface for the index, thus giving researchers the ability to search across several hundred institutions' collections with a single query.
SAA's Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Description, which include international representation, embarked on a revision of the EAD standard in 2010.
One of the most ambitious efforts is the Online Archive of California, a union catalog of over 5,000 EAD finding aids covering manuscripts and images from institutions across the state.
The French National Library Francois Mitterrand publishes more than 90,000 EAD finding aids covering archives and manuscripts.
Example: Several additional descriptive elements may follow the did including: The second, and usually largest, section of the archdesc is the dsc, which contains a full inventory of the collection broken down into progressively smaller intellectual chunks.
In particular, Buneman and Silvello[26] proposed a rule-based system to automatically create citation snippets to be used as references when citing XML data; a case study is based on EAD.
Furthermore, Silvello[27] proposed a framework, which learning from examples, automatically creates references at a different level of coarseness for XML files.
