EAD, part 1

read:

Encoded Archival Description on the Internet, Daniel Pitti and Wendy Duff, eds. 2001.

"Using the open archives initiative protocols with EAD," Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 2002.

It took me a long time to work through Encoded Archival Description on the Internet, as it is very dense. Much of the book is an overview of the creation of the EAD standards and explanation of how EAD will facilitate resource discovery as compared to the traditional finding aid. There seems little to argue about here: clearly a finding aid marked-up and posted on the internet is more accessible than one that is sitting on a shelf in the archives.

There is also a certain amount of discussion in Encoded Archival Description on the Internet about MARC records for archival materials, which integrate it into the rest of the library catalog, albeit at the collection level. I know Dr Galloway, for one, is positively disdainful of the utility of this. Certainly, there is so little information on a MARC record, comparatively, it is difficult to see how it could be truly helpful. If you are looking for information related to the creator of the collection, chances are you already know where his/her records are likely to be. If not, a quick Google search will tell you. The heterogeneity of the collection is the thing that needs to be conveyed for the record to be useful, and that cannot be done in the MARC format.

As usual, Anne Gilliland-Swetland's piece at the end of the book--alas, I read it in order!--was the most illuminating. She talks about the three reasons for finding aids, and how each of them are related to EAD. Access, which I have been thinking of pretty much exclusively, is only one of them. One of the reasons her article is useful is that she discusses at length research that Marcia Bates has done as to how researchers use the finding aid. She includes techniques like berrypicking, browsing, name searching, etc. Gilliland-Swetland then talks about these in the context of EAD. After all the vague discussion in the rest of the book about how EAD will facilitate access, actually seeing research done on the subject was very useful!

A major recurring theme in all the articles in the book is that of what they call union discovery, of standardized markup so that a researcher can search across EAD platforms and discover records regardless of the institution that houses them. It took me a while to figure out that they were not necessarily talking about Web search, but rather something like OAI-PMH, which facilitates resource discovery by harvesting exposed metadata from a variety of institutions so a user can do one search and obtain results from a variety of different institutions.

I went on to read the 2002 article about OAI and EAD to learn more about the two in relation to one another. These authors found that integrating EAD records into OAI would require the loss of a significant amount of detail in the EAD record, or the creation of multiple OAI records from one EAD record. They determine that even with its inherent limitations, such a compromise would be useful as an alternative access point. It certainly seems to me that it would be more so than MARC records of archival collections, at any rate. However, since Yahoo! and Google are no longer searching through the OAI-PMH protocols, would anyone find these records anyway? A librarian I spoke with yesterday (I am at TLA) said that you could instead convert your OAI aggregation into XML and then Google could find it. I wonder if this is anything other than a stopgap? Will OAI fall by the wayside anyway? And I don't know much about EAD and Google--finding aids and search engines were not covered in this book, much to my chagrin, so I will look for more of these for next week. I also have a couple more EAD/Web resources I will check out in part or in whole to see if they have additional information.