> From my initial reading of the EAD documentation, EAD presumes a
> completely processed collection into a hierachical, intellectual
> arrangement by series and/or subseries, then by boxes with the
> series/subseries, and file folders, items, or volumes within the boxes.
If you have a completely processed collection, that certainly allows you to
create a detailed EAD record fairly quickly. But that's by no means a
prerequisite for an EAD finding aid. Many of our manuscript collections are
unprocessed in the sense that no item-level inventory or finding aid has
been done. These collections only have high-level information -- the
EADHEADER data and then the ARCHDESC down to but not including
the DSC. So we create the skeleton EAD using that information, then in
the DSC we put this:
<dsc>
<head>Inventory</head>
<note><p>An item-level inventory has not yet been created for this
collection.</p></note>
</dsc>
or this:
<dsc>
<head>Inventory</head>
<note><p>The item-level inventory for this collection has not yet been
converted to electronic format. Please contact the Repository listed above
for more information.</p></note>
</dsc>
This lets us get our collection information published quickly, lets people
know what collections we have, and gives our data the opportunity to be
harvested by google etc so people are more likely to find us :)
> The physical arrangement of the collection corresponds to the
> intellectual arrangement of the materials in the collection, and both
> correspond to the logical ordering of the finding aid.
Not necessarily. I struggled with this when I started working with EAD
-- how the physical layout relates to the EAD layout. The bottom line
is: it doesn't. The primary organizing categories as EAD sees it are not
boxes or folders, but rather the intellectual divisions (series, subseries)
of a collection. This is reflected in EAD, in which CONTAINER is a
child element of C0# -- it is a facet of a single item, not a concept used
for grouping many items.
So for example in one of our finding aids you might see this:
Photographs
Box 1 Adam
Box 1 Bill
Oversize 1 Charlie
Map Drawer 47 Dave
Box 1 Edgar
Box 2 Freddy
Box 2 George
and so on. Of course intead of Oversize 1 for Charlie, you could have
"Charlie - See Oversize Box 1" and list all the oversize material at
the end under a series called "Oversize material." But our reasoning was
"Why send the researcher chasing round when what they really want to see is
all the photos listed together? And why enforce a shelf list approach when
EAD emphasizes the intellectual structure of the material over the
physical container/location?"
I think this also partly addresses your questions 1 and 2.
> 3. Are most libraries going back to fully process older collections
> according to the hierarchical structure of EAD or not? Staffing is an
> issue here.
We're definitely not attempting that! We're converting the
finding aids we currently have, starting with the ones that are
already in some sort of electronic format (HTML, Word, Excel,
what have you).
We are doing a few processing-type things such as correcting any
errors or inconsistencies, and investigating anything that looks odd.
Converting to EAD sometimes unearths problems like a "See also" reference
that has no target, or items listed as being in a location that no
longer exists. We're also capturing information that isn't in the current
finding aids -- getting CONTROLACCESS subelements like SUBJECT,
GEOGNAME, or OCCUPATION from the MARC record, for example,
or adding information from MARC 520 or 545 to the BIOGHIST or
ABSTRACT elements.
Most of our existing finding aids follow the layout of the physical
containers -- e.g. the finding aid is in box order like a shelf list,
oversize material is listed last as "Oversize package 1," etc. As we move to
EAD, we're also rearranging the finding aid content as needed so that the
intellectual arrangement takes precedence, as shown above in the Photographs
example. We feel that it represents the "spirit" of the collection more
closely as well as better serving our researchers (who after all are
interested in, say, "Letters" not in "Oversize Boxes").
For some examples, see
http://libwww.syr.edu/digital/guides/a/artzybasheff_b.htm or
http://libwww.syr.edu/digital/guides/c/coiner_c.htm
Michele Rothenberger
Syracuse University Library,
Special Collections Research Center
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