At the risk of reviving an old debate, I do not see that
EAD has a particular weakness at item level description. If
SCOPECONTENT means the scope or content of the unit being
described, then it should be valid at any level.
At the Bodleian Library we have decided to use UNITTITLE
for the descriptive element. This presents no problems at
series or subseries level where the UNITTITLE often acts as
a sub-heading, but like Richard, we often have more
involved descriptions at lower levels. For consistency's
sake, we use UNITTITLE for a brief entry at item level, and
then use SCOPECONTENT for an expanded description.
eg
C03 LEVEL="FILE">
<DID>
<UNITTITLE>Papers of Lord Kimberley in Ireland,
<UNITDATE>1864-6</UNITDATE></UNITTITLE>
<UNITID>MS. Eng. c. 4059</UNITID>
<PHYSDESC>74 leaves</PHYSDESC>
</DID>
<SCOPECONTENT><P>including
<LIST>
<ITEM>(fols. 5-16) instructions to him as Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland, <DATE>1864</DATE></ITEM>
<ITEM>(fols. 17-20) printed form for swearing in as Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, <DATE>1864</DATE></ITEM>
<ITEM>(fols. 21-58) estimates for vice-regal carriages and
harnesses, <DATE>1864</DATE> </ITEM>
<ITEM>(fols. 61-74) memorials on leaving Ireland,
<DATE>1866</DATE></ITEM>
</LIST></P>
</SCOPECONTENT>
</C03>
If anyone has good reason to think that this is an
unworkable solution, please let us know before we really
get stuck into retroconversion. It took us quite a long
time to get past the idea that UNITTITLE might not
literally mean a title - we did not want to start inventing
titles for files or volumes of papers. However, for display
purposes we did not want verbose descriptions to appear in
UNITTITLE. In our old catalogues we found that in most
cases even lengthy descriptions included an essential
element that could easily be extracted for the UNITTITLE,
as in the example above which was a continuous paragraph in
our printed catalogue.
Michael Webb
Assistant Librarian
Special Collections and Western Manuscripts
Bodleian Library
[log in to unmask]
On Fri, 12 Nov 1999 09:31:55 +0000 Richard Higgins
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This depends upon how much text is in the information section. I'm not
> convinced that <unittitle> is helpful at item level to enclose what
> could be a lengthy description.
> Other possibilities include:
>
> <c?? level="item">
> <did>
> <container ....>Box 1, Folder 1</container>
> <unitdate>2/16/1947</unitdate>
> </did>
> <scopecontent><p>John Smith to William Jones: Memorandum concerning
> business</p></scopecontent></c??>
>
> This would involve including an extra macro in your markup routine to
> put a "to" between writer and recipient and a":" after recipient. You
> could also include <persname> wrappers in the same macro if you really
> wished to bloat the finding aid.
>
> I wouldn't use this method myself, as I prefer to keep the item level
> content description within the item level <did> [see mails to mailing
> list over last four years, passim] but the only way this can be done is
> to use <note> within the <did> (and similar macros).
>
> <c?? level="item">
> <did>
> <container ....>Box 1, Folder 1</container>
> <unitdate>2/16/1947</unitdate>
> <note encodinganalog="MARC520"><p>John Smith to William Jones:
> Memorandum concerning business</p></note></did></c??>
>
> Sadly EAD was not designed primarily for item level description, and is
> at its weakest here. Be glad your item description are short, and not
> nested in the middle of each other ...
>
> --
> Richard Higgins
> Durham University Library
>
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