Hi Michael --
Right, the files are organized around projects; that's how they're arranged in the processed collection and also (probably) how the information will be structured in the EAD finding aid. Beyond that we have information about each project as a whole -- building style, building size, dates of construction, participating engineers / contractors / designers, awards it won, materials and techniques used in construction, etc. That means thinking about the final built object, as opposed to the process(es) that resulted in it.
This could, as you say, be included in the EAD and I'll explore that further. But if we want to be able to capitalize (read: search) on unique characteristics of a specific project, as opposed to a collection of papers; or if we want to be able to display a nicely formatted "project page" for each endeavor, maybe CCO is likely to be a better fit. Not to mention that we have, or will have, most of the project data in a database already, so spitting out CDWA-Lite would be a snap. There are of course some projects that did not result in a built object, like competitions for example; we'll have to give some thought to whether those would be a good fit. So maybe keeping the narrative description in the EAD makes more sense after all. Hm...Something to ponder over the long weekend :)
Interesting point about using CCO for the individual drawings; to be honest I don't think we really considered that, since we're treating the mass of material as a manuscript collection, not as individual items ("damn it, Jim, I'm an archive, not a museum!").
Thanks!
Michele
-----Original Message-----
From: Encoded Archival Description List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Fox, Michael
Sent: Friday, September 03, 2010 11:05 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Encoding schema/DTD for project data
It is my understanding that the files and other records of architectural firms are often organized around projects. I don't know what's in your finding aid or how it is organized but is there some way to connect the projects and their records? Might this information be imbedded within the finding aid itself.
If your want this information in a separate file, the hierarchical structure of EAD wherein the body of the firm's work is the top level and the projects are described as components of it, suggests that a second EAD instance might be used to organize this data though it would certainly be a nonstandard use.
If you are describing the output of those projects in the forms of structures or even work products such as drawings the item level, then CCO seems to fit. But projects are an amorphous concepts and CCO seems to be about describing concrete "things".
If you just want to create narrative data in an XML format with some simple structure so that you can link data about projects with separate information about the resulting records and about their creators, there are other, simper solutions like Book Doc.
Michael Fox
|