How detailed do you want? Most of our finding aids could be accused of
being too detailed - nearly all are at item level, none followed
consistent content rules, and certainly many give far more information
than I would have liked ...
Some of our calendars of medieval deeds are somewaht copious - summary
of text, names of all witnesses, dating clauses, locations of other
copies, seals, editions, what the weather was like on the day of
cataloguing etc. etc. etc. If you really want to torment your EAD tags,
you want an Inspeximus, which recites the contents of earlier deeds: if
these do survive elsewhere, you just cross-link to that description, but
if they don't, you catalogue them in full where they occur in the
document. Thus you can get document descriptions embedded in a main
document, returning to that main document between documents. If you are
really lucky, it is an Inspeximus of an Inspeximus which goes way beyond
EAD (the trick is to use <archref> for tag abusers out there).
As to how clearly this hierarchy comes out (at least when rendered in
HTML) you can judge from the following entry for a charter of Richard
II:
http://flambard.dur.ac.uk:6336/dynaweb/handlist/ddc/dcdreg/XMLPointer(ID(R-3-4-6)
(Even our URLs are verbose; incidentally, this is also an example of a
finding aid whose sections do not break up into small enough pieces for
optimum downloading).
Don't blame me, I only mark these things up.
--
# Richard Higgins
# Durham University Library
# Archives & Special Collections
# Palace Green
# Durham
# DH1 3RN
# E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Bob Walser wrote:
>
> The present discussion of large finding aids is very helpful. I'm
> working on a project that will result in something like 15,000
> item-level entries (most at the <c05> level). For practical
> reasons we plan to do our day-to-day work in chunks of
> the whole using entity references. I'm watching the discussion
> with interest for ideas about delivering our results to users.
>
> Our item-level entries are very detailed - far more detailed than
> any EAD sites I've seen so far. Can anyone direct me to a site
> with very detailed item-level data?
>
> Thanks,
> Bob Walser
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Robert Young Walser
> The James Madison Carpenter Project
> Office telephone: 1-612-374-4364
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