First, a point of clarification on ARUP (acceptable range of uniform
practice), which is a phrase Daniel coined several months ago as Berkeley
embarked on a couple of EAD union database projects.  As I understand it,
ARUP will make it much more feasible for finding aids from different
repositories to reside harmoniously on a server, to be globally updated
when necessary, and it should provide predictable results when searching
across finding aids.  Daniel is working on a set of ARUP guidelines for the
American Heritage Virtual Archive Project (Berkeley, Duke, Stanford, and
Virginia) and the University of California System Project, which I'm sure
he'll make available as soon as it's ready.

EAD was designed to privilege the intellectual organization of a finding
aid (and, therefore, the collection) over the physical arrangement,
because, as it has been explained to me, SGML doesn't handle two kinds of
logic simultaneously very well.  Therefore, if you use the <c0x> tags to
code both the intellectual *and* physical arrangements, you are mixing the
logics.  The <c0x> elements have a level attribute to allow you to specify
the *intellectual* level of the material you're describing in relation to
the other levels present in the collection.  There is no way to specify in
<c0x> what boxes and folders represent (there is no label attribute, and
the "file" attribute value does not mean "folder" in this instance).  The
<unitloc> element has a containertype attribute to indicate physical
container (boxes and folders).  The <dentry> and <drow> and <tspec>
elements were created to support the tabular layout archivists frequently
use for container lists.  It's messy, I know, but until we figure out if
the tabular layout can be generated completely by style sheets, necessary.


Kris

Kris Kiesling
Head, Department of Manuscripts and Archives
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
P.O. Drawer 7219
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX  78713-7219
Voice:  (512) 471-9119
Fax:  512.471.2899
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