I'm pleased to announce "RLG Best Practice Guidelines for Encoded Archival
Description" (www.rlg.org/rlgead/bpg.pdf).

These guidelines were developed by the RLG EAD Advisory Group between
October 2001 and August 2002 to:

-- facilitate interoperability of resource discovery by imposing a basic
degree of uniformity on the creation of valid EAD-encoded documents,
-- encourage the inclusion of particular elements, and
-- develop a set of core data elements.

In fall 2001, RLG charged a reconstituted EAD Advisory Group with revising
RLG's existing guidelines for three reasons:

(1) an awareness that encoding practices have evolved considerably since
pioneering repositories began submitting finding aids under the original
1998 RLG encoding guidelines;
(2) an appreciation that the community of EAD practitioners has grown
markedly since then, including a significant expansion outside the United
States; and
(3) the knowledge that the impending release of EAD 2002, the updated
version of the DTD would of itself require changes in the encoding
guidelines.

Nine experienced EAD users worked with program officer Merrilee Proffitt to
evaluate and rework the existing guidelines: Greg Kinney (Bentley Library,
University of Michigan), Mary Lacy (Library of Congress), Dennis Meissner
(Minnesota Historical Society), Naomi Nelson (Emory University), Richard
Rinehart (Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive), David Ruddy (Cornell
University), William Stockting (Public Records Office, United Kingdom),
Michael Webb (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford), and Timothy Young
(Beinecke Library, Yale University). Members of the group surveyed best
practice documents from a number of different repositories and projects
before beginning their task.

Group members settled on two key objectives. One was to identify and define
the use of a minimal set of EAD elements and attributes complete enough to
assure that information in finding aids is adequate to serve the users'
needs and yet parsimonious enough to prevent excessive encoding overhead on
the creators.

Their second objective was to assure that the guidelines stand a reasonable
chance of meeting the needs of an international encoding community. The
advisory group had to be as sensitive to the requirements of international
archival standards, such as ISAD(G) (General International Standard
Archival Description) as it has to those of MARC and APPM (Archives,
Personal Papers and Manuscripts is a widely used content standard for
finding aids in the United States, written in the context of the
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition).

The advisory group went beyond its initial mandate and has sought to
articulate a set of best practice guidelines for EAD encoding in a union
environment. The guidelines recommend additional encoding that represent
best practices for describing archival materials within the EAD
environment.

Thanks are due not only to current and past members of the advisory group,
but also to those who made their own guidelines available to the group for
analysis, and to Hannah Frost for giving the group access to her comparison
of guidelines produced in the United States. A group of outside reviewers
(Christine Woodland, Bill Landis, Elizabeth Shaw, Elizabeth Dow, Michael
Fox, Dorothy Johnston, Guenter Waibel, and Tim Hutchinson) offered
commentary and additional revisions that helped the advisory group make the
document stronger. Finally, thanks are due to Dennis Meissner for ably
chairing the group. The discussion that produced this document all took
place via email and conference calls, and Dennis provided strong, cheerful
leadership to help move the document along in a virtual meeting space.

For more information, contact Merrilee Proffitt, [log in to unmask]


Merrilee Proffitt
Research Libraries Group -- www.rlg.org
1200 Villa Street, Mountain View, CA 94041 USA
voice: +1-650-691-2309 -- [log in to unmask]