Week 3: Meetings

This week consisted of many meetings. On Monday, Joanna, Jen and I met with Sue Julich to learn about Archon, an open-source program for delivering finding aids online in EAD. Sue showed us the basics of the program, and Joanna and I later spent time exploring it ourselves. We plugged in some legacy (i.e. old) finding aids to see how it worked. The nice thing about the software is that you don't have to actually write any EAD code yourself, but can copy and paste text into boxes with the appropriate headers and an EAD document is automatically created. The downside to this might be a lack of control, and that's something we'll have to evaluate as we assess the program further.

We also had meetings with David McCartney from University Archives and Janet Weaver from the Iowa Women's Archives. Like our meeting with Greg Prickman, our purpose was to learn about the current state of finding aids and the typical workflow in those units. The upshot is that all of them have their finding aids available online as static HTML pages. The format and means of processing them differ somewhat from unit to unit, but there don't seem to be any major differences beyond that.

Finally, I spent more time researching EAD to get a firmer grasp on how it is structured and what the different tags mean. I still have a ways to go on that front, as the tag library is quite large. I also took notes from the book "Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts" by Kathleen Roe, to get a clearer understanding of terminology used in the archives world (fonds, series, manuscript vs. record group, etc.) that may be useful for learning EAD.

Next week, there's a data migration meeting planned with Wendy Robertson on Monday. Aside from that I plan to continue doing research, working with Archon, and playing around with EAD tags. Over the weekend, I'll be attending a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) workshop at the University of Illinois. TEI is a markup language similar to EAD. Hopefully, learning it will prove to be very helpful for this project.

Week 2: The Fog is Lifting

While the first round of articles I read last week were definitely a bit over my head, I feel I am starting to understand better the whole concept of EAD and how it works. I generally need to try something out in order to really grasp it, so the time I spent yesterday actually working with an EAD document was pretty helpful. Jen had Joanna and I copy an EAD template online from a finding aid for a collection at the UC Irvine libraries, and replace the content with elements from Iowa Women's Archives finding aids. It was good practice, and helped me see how an EAD document is structured and how it relates to an HTML finding aid. I could only get so far with the document because the UC and UI finding aids were structured differently enough that they appeared to be only partially translatable. I also didn't understand what all the tags meant. There's still a steep learning curve to overcome, but it has gotten a little less intimidating.

On Thursday, Joanna, Jen and I had a meeting with Greg Prickman from Special Collections. The purpose was to assess the scope and format of finding aids currently being used in that department, to give us a clearer idea of what we'll be dealing with in planning the EAD migration. Joanna and I prepared a set of questions about the collections and how they are described. We learned that there are approximately 2,000 finding aids, and that they are all in HTML created from a standard template. This is good news, as it should make the creation of EAD records easier.

We will also schedule meetings with representatives from University Archives and the Iowa Women's Archive to learn about their collections. Next week, we will revisit the EAD templates we started; meet with Sue Julich to get an introduction to Archon, an archival information system; and continue doing research.

Week 1 (2.0): New Semester, New Project

After finishing up the recipe pamphlet digital collection over winter break, and taking a much-needed breather from school, I'm gearing up to start a brand new project this semester. And I have a partner! Joanna Lee and I are going to be working together on the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) pilot collection. I will again be working in Digital Library Services, with Jen Wolfe and Sue Julich as project mentors.

For any non-library types in the audience, EAD is an XML markup language that enables encoding of archival finding aids into records that are platform-independent, machine-readable, and fully searchable. In other words, it will allow users to search across various online indexes of archival collections, which are currently not standardized.

This project should prove to be fairly different from the previous one, as it will involve figuring out how to implement a new process that isn't yet in place. This will require researching how other institutions have used EAD and determining the best way to begin using it at the U of I Libraries. As I understand it, the end goal is to produce a prototype EAD collection on which to base future migration of HTML finding aids.

Our first assignment from Jen has been to research EAD and find case studies discussing its integration into other institutions' collections. We are looking at online resources and reading articles from LIS journals. On Monday, we'll be meeting with her to discuss what we've learned. The next step will be to start analyzing other EAD sites on the Web.