Hello,

I am currently working in a temporary Systems position at the University of
British Columbia library. Our Special Collections and Archives division
recently began a project on implementing EAD on our existing archive
documents.

I became quite involved in this project because I love to work on
XML-related projects and also because I was one of few people in our Systems
division who had previously dealt with XML, XSLT, XPath, etc before in some
form of a production environment.

Any ways, I am concerned about this project because our division is
basically taken by surprise. The original plan was that Systems provided 2
copies of XMetaL and Archives division was supposed to take care of the
rest. As the project progressed, however, it turned out that they required
more support from Systems.

I am currently writing a custom XSLT that suits the purposes of UBC.
However, I found it impossible to write a "universal" stylesheet that
supports all sorts of archive documents. I find it particularly difficult
because I have absolutely no background in archiving. I am using Michael
Fox's cookbook stylesheets as a reference and need to constantly look up the
EAD tag library.

To make a longer story short, we are concerned about this project because
nearly all our Systems staff (myself included) are loaded with other
projects and once my position ends at the end of August, the Systems person
in charge of this project will need to train himself in XML to continue
support.

I am seeking for advises based on the approaches taken by your institution.
How are you dealing with XSLT on EAD? Is a Systems division taking care of
them? Or did your Archives division train one of their staff in XML/XSLT?

Thanks.