Hi Michele

I think this type of canned search can be fragile and hard to maintain 
for the long run.  Ideally, you'll have a unique identifier for each 
item in your digital repository that can stand the test of time and be 
independent of any system.  I do, however, think that it is beneficial 
to describe individual items down to the item level in EAD.  We do this 
for our visual materials collections where the actual digital objects 
are stored in CONTENTdm.  We then can take the metadata for each item 
from the EAD record and import it into CONTENTdm via a script.  If you 
can export metadata out of your digital repository, you might be able to 
run it through a script and re-purpose it by adding it to your finding 
aid, and creating the links at the same time.  You might also want to 
take a look at <daogrp> instead of <dao> which gives you a few more 
places to stick information for these types of links.  I hope this 
helps.  Feel free to contact me offlist if you want more information.

Mark Carlson
Special Collections
University of Washington Libraries

On 4/6/2011 7:02 PM, Michele R Combs wrote:
> Suppose that you have a collection of 3500 items that has been completely digitized.
> Suppose that you do not wish to have 3500<dao>'s in your EAD finding aid, but instead would prefer to provide a link that would fire off a search of your digital image system and retrieve all relevant items for each particular series or subseries,
> Suppose, finally, that you do not wish to hard code a full URL of "http://very-very-very-long-string" but rather want to encode just the relevant search terms and let the style sheet construct the link.
>
> Presumably you would still use<dao>  for this, since these are digital versions of archival material in the collection.  But what attribute(s) of the<dao>  would you use to encode the search terms?
>
> For example, let's say this dao is intended to fire off a search of a digital collection called "Gerrit Smith" and bring up all the correspondence from 1850-1860.  Would this be a correct encoding, with the two search parameters in the href?
>
> <c02>
>     <did>
>        <unittitle>Correspondence></unittitle>
>        <unitdate normal="1850/1860">1850-1860</unitdate>
>        <dao
>           linktype="simple"
>           role="http://digilib.syr.edu/Gerrit_Smith"
>           href="type:correspondence;date:1850-1860"
>           actuate="onrequest"
>           show="new"/>
>     </did>
> </c02>
>
> Also, if anyone has working examples of something like this please share.
>
> Michele
>
> Michele