EAD: Encoded Archival Description-Version 2002 Official Site

EAD: Encoded Archival Description-Version 2002 Official Site

Web archiving

The official website of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), details the history and evolution of this essential finding aid for archives and archival holdings. The site also includes principles and guidelines for each EAD version, tools and helper files, articles, and a link to the EAD listserve. Finally, the site discusses a recently developed schema for archives, the EAD-CPF (Corporate bodies, Persons and Families), which provides additional contextual information regarding the creators of the archival materials. Although the technical information regarding the schema structure, application, and tools is clearly written and accessible by non-experts, the documented history and rationale for creating and extending the EAD is particularly relevant for creating a digital archive about digital archives. The effort to create a data structure standard for preserving and accessing archival objects and records was largely the work of Daniel Pitti, co-director of IATH and former librarian at the University of California Berkeley. EAD was developed under Pitti’s tutelage at UC Berkeley and he has continued his expansion of EAD with the recently added schema, EAD-CFP. The site explains why SGML was chosen as best standard for encoding archival documents and also generally describes how it works (it helps create a DTD, which is a document type definition, a template that guides and standardizes archival description. It works as a digital form of preservation).

Library of Congress

Library of Congress

2011-11-01

2002

Polk, Victoria

Library of Congress, Society of American Archivists

English

Website

http://www.loc.gov/ead/

"EAD," Library of Congress. 2012. Last modified on Nov. 11, 2011. http://www.loc.gov/ead.