Thanks Mark and Saašha for your reponses.



Mark - So am I right in thinking that whichever version (1998 or 2002) of 
the EAD schema your file is based on it will still validate correctly 
against http://www.loc.gov/ead/ead.xsd? However we still don’t know whether 
this will be the case for the next version if it uses the same URI?



Saašha – Really interested to hear about the XSLT to update EAD 2002 to 
next version.  However I’m not sure how this would work with our EAD output 
which has been tailored slightly by our catalogue provider to meet our 
requirements.  Also at present we do not have mechanisms in place to update 
descriptive metadata in our METS documents when either a newer version of 
the standard becomes available or if the original MARC record changes.  
Although this is something we hope to have in the future so as to ensure 
that descriptive data in our catalogue and METS documents are kept in 
synch.  For this reason we point directly to the specific version of the 
schema e.g. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-3.xsd  rather than 
the generic http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods.xsd so that our METS 
documents remain valid even if there is a newer version of the standard 
available.



Until someone can confirm that our EAD based on 2002 version will remain 
valid when validating against http://www.loc.gov/ead/ead.xsd when 2013 
version becomes available I think our safest option would be to hold a copy 
of the xsd as it stands currently locally so that our METS will remain 
valid. 



Thanks,

Vicky

Digital Standards Manager

National Library of Wales