Hi,
I just wanted to let folks here know about a tool I've released that I
think may be useful for others. It is a little web application that
can accept a CSV file container list and give back EAD XML. We use
Archivists' Toolkit for managing our collection guides, but there are
cases [1] where it makes sense to have such a tool. For instance, we
sometimes get a container list from a donor as a spreadsheet that
could at least form the basis for a preliminary inventory so that we
can quickly make the collection accessible. We wanted a tool to
generate the EAD from that content.

If you ever have a similar need to convert a spreadsheet into EAD XML,
then Steady may save you some time. There's a little work you still
need to do to have your spreadsheet headers conform to the necessary
scheme and export as CSV, but it may be worth it not to manually
retype the content.

http://steady.heroku.com/

Please let me know if you use this or have ideas for how to improve it.

By the way, the application code [2] and the underlying library [3]
are available as open source.

Jason

[1] current use cases: http://steady.heroku.com/pages/about
[2] Steady: https://github.com/jronallo/steady
[3] stead: https://github.com/jronallo/stead