Jennie, hi -

I urge you to put together a MARAC session called "Elegant and Seamless" 
  - make it a discussion session with some invited leaders to guide 
brainstorming over issues of length, hierarchies, stylesheets, 
navigation, etc.  We all share the pain of large collections and complex 
finding aids. :-)

Rebecca  (reading from home where I dare not open your Agnew file)

Jennie A. Levine wrote:
> Michele,
> I would be interested in responses to this as well, just as a point of 
> discussion.
> 
> We've had several similar scenarios and dealt with each one differently. 
> We have one collection where we try to show both box and reel locations 
> by putting the reels and frames in the <physdesc> tag in the <c02> and 
> <c03> levels as appropriate.  I don't know how "right" that is, but that 
> worked with our style sheet.  The Guide to the Papers of Djuna Barnes 
> has about 2200 "rows"
> 
> http://www.lib.umd.edu/archivesum/actions.DisplayEADDoc.do?source=/MdU.ead.litms.0021.xml&style=ead 
> 
> 
> (for example)
> 
> I do think that is difficult to read on a screen, or even on a printout, 
> and not lose your place. We are working on revising our style sheets to 
> be more hierarchical in display to "solve" this problem (it's pretty 
> cool so far, actually, and I hope we'll be able to show people live in a 
> month or so - it's similar to the James Madison Carpenter Finding Aid 
> found here - http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/carpenter/browse.html), and 
> maybe change the print versions to list things like Series and Subseries 
> next to each item so that people can tell quickly where they are.
> 
> Our Papers of Spiro T. Agnew guide is over 12,000 "rows" (only open if 
> you are certain of your browser stability and Internet connection...)
> 
> http://www.lib.umd.edu/archivesum/actions.DisplayEADDoc.do?source=/MdU.ead.litms.0021.xml&style=ead 
> 
> 
> Series III, Subseries 5, which is even difficult to navigate to in our 
> current stylesheet, is a PDF, just to try to keep the finding aid from 
> crashing people's browsers.  (You can do a "find" for "Subseries 3.5: to 
> find the link).
> 
> I really dislike the way we had to handle this - it just feels awkward 
> to me. It wasn't too hard to make the PDF since all of our EAD data is 
> in database form, but still it was an extra step I'd like to avoid! And 
> I have seen other posts on this listserv with questions about elegant 
> and seamless ways to break up finding aids and am not sure if anyone 
> came up with any answers? If they did, I'd love to know!
> 
> So, I don't have any answers - but I share your pain and am interested 
> in solutions people might have.
> 
> Jennie
>