Rich:

I was glad to read your responses to Alvin's questions and found
it reassuring that we were agreement on both issues. I'll take a
stab at answering your questions, with the understanding that my
Bentley colleagues will chime in and correct me if I misstate our
intentions.

(1) I don't recall that we ever discussed at length the need to
     capture information about the copyright in a finding aid.
     Some folks suggested that the Required Footer <requiredft>
     might carry a copyright notice about the finding aid. I
     would think that the date of copyright could be indicated by
     using the <date> tag with the type attribute set to
     "copyright" or some such text explanation. Perhaps because
     I work in a government repository which does not copyright
     any of its publications, I personally have a hard time
     thinking of a reason why I would want to tag copyright
     information about a finding aid. What action do you
     anticipate taking on this information? searching?
     retrieval? etc. Maybe I'm overlooking the obvious.

(2) As currently written, the DTD permits use of the
     <relatedmaterial> element only within <add>. The purpose of
     this restrictive use was to segregate the descriptive
     information about the core materials being described in
     <archdesc> from auxiliary information about either related
     or separated materials, or supplemental information, such as
     bibliographies and indices, which help facilitate research
     use of the <archdesc> materials. In my mind, the
     <relatedmaterial> element would surround a list or an
     extensive description about the location, extent, content, etc., of
     a related body of materials. Although there might be
     mention of these materials elsewhere in the finding aid,
     e.g., in the scope and content note, I did not envision
     using the <relatedmaterial> element to tag such occurrences.

(3) I don't have a good answer to this question. I agree with
     you that <arrangement> and <organization> should probably be made
     more available. I can imagine using them within a series
     description, which would mean making them available under
     <dsc>.


Hope this helps.

Janice


Janice E. Ruth
Manuscript Division
Library of Congress