EAD, part 2

Read: Encoding Across Frontiers. Stockting and Queyroux, eds, 2004.

Finally, a book that gets at what I really want to know about finding aids on the Web! I have been reading this, slowly, all week--it is a collection of papers from the European Conference on EAD in 2004. Actually, both the conference and the book are about EAD and EAC, which is Encoded Archival Context. The projects are discussions of real-life implementations of EAD and EAC at various stages, with discussions of the constraints, decisions, and paths not taken for projects all over Europe.

One of the ideas that resonated most with me relates to something we've been talking about in IA class--that structure conveys knowledge. This is a big part of the reason I am so interested in finding aids in the first place: the challenge of presenting a big, diverse, complex body of material with clarity and in multiple dimensions. One of the essays discusses the need for EAD to be modular and discrete, and to keep the record, creator, and function descriptions separate from one another. At first this is confusing, because of course these are the meat of any archival description. But in EAD it is the relationships of the these modular pieces to one another that convey the most information. This make so much sense! In this way the descriptions cease to be bulky, wordy things, but elements that can be combined and recombined to describe multiple features of multiple series. And of course, provide multiple points of access, as well.

The paper from Angelika Menne-Haritz about Midosa XML addressed this well, I thought. She described the job of the archivist as one of describing for the user the information around the records which is not represented within the records, such as conversations, that comprise the bulk of the process: she says that records are only "traces of their material part " (pg 89). A good archivist, and a good finding aid, can convey the information around these traces. She specifically talks about a variety of tools that can be used in a digital environment to do this, such as digital representations of records. Midosa in fact provides for the inclusion of such tools within the finding aid. And so, it seems to me, that once you include such interpretive elements finding aids become so much more than they are on paper. They move closer to digital libraries.

One of the concluding essays describes an unexpected effect of EAD implementation, that of greater collaboration between different types of institutions. I think this is because once the records become modular, and exist in the rootless environment of the Web, there is a much greater chance of connecting them in new and interesting ways. I think that's the beauty of EAD and especially of EAC: the promise at least of providing all the necessary context but at a much more granular level than you could get at in a non-digital environment. Instead of having to drill down, as in a traditional finding aid, you could theoretically locate the exact chunk you are looking for and then drill up, contextualizing as you go, adding in as much detail as you like.

And you can mix and match in a way never before possible. Archives are certainly more connected to one another through EAD, especially in Britain. The A2A federated catalogue of 44 different archives seems particularly promising, although the search is pretty clunky. I played with it a bit and turned up lots of hits on a search of "Ormonde" (as in the Earl of) but most of the early ones were from the same collection. I like the list of institutions offered on the right hand side of the page, and the advanced search is probably much better, but there really should be a "see more from this collection" kind of function, like the one Google has. I think search is probably the biggest challenge for many of these systems Aat least 2 articles in the book mention that their EAD catalogues have a "Google-style" search box--but that doesn't mean they retrieve as well!

Additionally, I don't know how well such a federated system would work with Google--do they have the same problem as OIA-PMH? I Googled "Ormonde" and got some of the same results from the National Archives. But this page was much cleaner, and did not have the same duplication. Perhaps the assumption is that if you are using the A2A you are looking for a more granular level. Frustratingly, though, the National Archives results have lots of see-also "record references" and "other references": but these are not hyperlinked. And "other references" is NOT a helpful term!

So I think EAD seems to offer huge strides in online display of finding aids, but users are still very constrained by the software used in its implementation. The focus in the books I've read so far has been on the markup of legacy finding aids, and there is no question that EAD offers the best and most realistic way to put functional finding aids online. But the markup alone doesn't provide access--and the some of the other pieces seem to be lagging behind.