Office for Information Systems - Harvard University Library

Proposals for revisions to EAD standard

From: Robin McElheny

Date: 01/31/2011 3:52 PM

Sent To: HULINFO

Categorized As: All Systems News, Manuscripts & Archives Tools

To:     the Harvard EAD community
From:   Manuscripts and Archives Access Group

As you may already know, SAA's Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Description has issued a call for comments on the revision of EAD (http://www.archivists.org/standards/ead/eadRevisions.asp).  The deadline for submitting comments to SAA is February 28, 2011.

As one of its final tasks, the Manuscripts and Archives Access Group (MAAG) is coordinating proposed EAD revisions from the Harvard library community.  To start the discussion, Michael Vandermillen (OIS, OASIS system manager), Robin Wendler (OIS Metadata Analyst), and Kate Bowers (DSCWG member, ATWG chair) have drafted a preliminary list of proposed revisions reflecting current and future use of EAD at Harvard.

We encourage your comments and additions to the following list.  Please send them to Robin McElheny, chair of MAAG, at robin_mcelheny@harvard.edu.  The deadline for comments and proposals within Harvard is Friday, February 4.

Preliminary list of proposed EAD revisions
Four revisions to accommodate local changes that the Harvard EAD user community uses locally for OASIS indexing and display:

1.      related metadata record element (place to record Aleph record numbers or other system numbers)
2.      file size attribute (which holds data to display file size in OASIS search results - a warning to users that file may be large)
3.      digital content flag (which allows for OASIS search limitation to finding aids with links to digital content)
4.      begin year / end year attributes for <unitdate> (which is used for computational efficiency to index dates)
Other revisions:
5.      MODS-style encoding granularity for <controlaccess> (see, for example, <subject> in http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-userguide-elements.html)
6.      global unique identifier for digital objects (i.e. a place to store resolvable DRS IDs in finding aids)
7.      alternate unit title (to accommodate EAD encoding of CCO and other descriptive content standards, including several emerging DCRM standards, that have this element)

Robin McElheny
Associate University Archivist for Collections and Public Services
Harvard University Archives