Nathan Tallman asked:

> Just out of curiosity, is anyone using an online catalog that is entirely EAD-based?



While the "Catholic Portal" of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance is not 100% based on EAD metadata, it could be.

The Portal's (sandbox) content comes from a variety of metadata sources: MARC, EAD, and Dublin Core harvested from OAI-PMH data repositories. The underlying software is VuFind, and as of version 1.0, VuFind actively supports the ingestion of arbitrary metadata.

More specifically, a number of the Alliance members have extensive EAD finding aids. I wrote a set of programs that harvest, verify & validate, tweak, transform, and index at an item level these EAD files. Search results return item level descriptions and links to complete finding aids. I described this work in a number of blog postings:

  * Indexing MARC and EAD in VUFind with Solr for the CRRA -- http://bit.ly/cIu0lG
  * VuFind, OAI-PMH, and the "Catholic Portal" -- http://bit.ly/fRRPp8

-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame