In the light of recent comments which have been made on this listserv, may
we invite our international collegues to visit the Access to Archives (A2A)
website at http://www.a2a.pro.gov.uk - the English strand in the UK national
archives network.

This site, formally launched on the web over a year ago, has at its heart a
native XML database of 50,000 EAD encoded catalogues (nearly 4 million files
and items) submitted from 184 individual repositories representing every
region of England. It is arguably one of the largest online applications of
its kind in the archival world, has been interrogated more than half a
million times, and has served well over one million catalogues over the WWW
in its first year.

As a tangible example of the use of XML and XSLT technologies online, we
hope A2A will be recognised as an active British participant in the
international state-of-the-art.