On the exchange below, I'd just like to clarify Jerry's Pronouncement a
little...
Some folks who are not from the traditional archives community or the
tradition of
finding aids have been testing the use of EAD to describe collections from
their
own communities. Examples are museums and some types of special collections.
It is just possible that METS might provide a reasonable alternative to
these folks
(not obvious, just possible). So while we don't endorse replacing EAD with METS
where EAD is clearly the appropriate, and community endorsed, encoding
strategy,
there may be situations where a collection-level METS that describes one or
more
digital item-level METS files would be perfectly fine.
Thanks, now *I* feel better...
MacKenzie/
>At 10:30 AM 5/2/2002 -0700, Guenter Waibel wrote:
>>This is the question I'm really curious about. A very similar
>>question came up at an Online Archive of California Subcommittee
>>meeting a couple of weeks back - how do you define where the EAD ends
>>and where METS begins if you use them in conjunction? Both standards
>>have the capability of describing a complex hierarchical structure
>>and at least theoretically, you could actually replace the EADs
>>function of hierarchically structuring a collection with a series of
>>nested METS documents pointing to more METS documents. I'm not
>>implying that it would be either wise or intellectually sound to do
>>so, but through the mptr, it's definitely conceivable.
>
>=======================================================
>
>Official METS Editorial Board Pronouncement from On High:
>
> METS should NOT, repeat, should NOT be used as a replacement
> for EAD. Not now. Not *ever*! NEVER!!!!
>
>=======================================================
MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-208
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617)253-8184
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