Dear Dale,

after spending a great deal of time trying to get Panorama to display
EAD tables, I hope I can help you with the table part of your question.

Panorama supports three types of table display: CALS tables,
row-oriented tables and a table model of their own. The EAD DTD includes
a standard CALS table structure
(<table>..<tgroup>..<tbody>..<row>..<entry>). However, the EAD also
includes an extension to CALS, which incorporates the information for
tabular display within elements representing the intellectual structure
of the document (e.g. <c01>..<drow><dentry><unittitle>). This is clearly
preferable to the standard CALS model, which does not allow you to
markup the hierarchy or content of the data in the table.

The EAD extension to CALS is not currently supported by Panorama, though
Yale has proposed this to SoftQuad and very much hopes that this will be
included in a future release. However, we have had some success using
the row-oriented table structure supported by Panorama.

The row-oriented table structure requires identifying particular
elements as tables, table rows and table cells in the document's style
sheet (in the 'Miscellaneous' properties section). The last two of these
elements are straightforward: you should identify the <drow> element as
a table row, and the <dentry> element as a table cell. Choosing an
element to identify as the table is more tricky. If you have container
listings which are short (i. e. less than 1500 lines), you can choose
<dsc> as the table element. This means that the whole of the <dsc>
element will be displayed as one table.

With longer finding aids, or to improve Panorama's performance, you must
choose subordinate elements within <dsc> to call tables, since Panorama
will not display tables correctly which are larger than this approximate
size. If you have series within your finding aid, tagged at the <c01>
level, for instance, you could identify <c01> as the table element
instead, making each series a separate table. This could be applied to
any subordinate component, so that <c02> or <c03> elements could instead
be  identified as tables. To avoid having to have more than one style
sheet for your documents, you could identfify the element you wish to
display as a table by giving it an attribute such as <c01
altrender="table"> and then using a qualified style specification in
Panorama.

There is still a problem with sections of a container listing bigger
than around 1500 lines which are not subdivided. The only workround we
have identified to date is to introduce 'dummy' elements which subdivide
the listing into 2 or more tables, though we are reluctant to do this as
it sacrifices the intellectual structure of the document to the
limitations of the display software.

Another limitation of this row-oriented approach is that Panorama will
ignore <colspec> and <spanspec> elements, instead making arbitrary
decisions about column width. This usually results in an acceptable
table display, but means that the column width will vary from table to
table, depending on the data within it. This is the reason why each line
in a container listing cannot be made a table of its own: the column
width would then vary from line to line.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about details of this
which I have not addressed. We should shortly be able to make the
database of Yale EAD finding aids we have encoded to date available for
searching and viewing, so you will be able to see examples of this
approach.

Yours,

        David.

--
David L. Clough
Reference Assistant, Yale Divinity Library
New Haven CT 06510 USA
(203) 432-6374 [log in to unmask]

L. Dale Pattersosn wrote:
>
> At the Spring MARAC meeting several of us were enthralled by the panel
> EAD discussion.  At the close of the session we were told where we could
> find the tag library for the ead and invited to look into it.  So, my
> staff and I have been working our way through this document over the
> summer and we have a couple of questions.
>
> In the eadheader there is the author element.  The few instances we have
> seen seem to have the creator of thte ead instance in this element - in
> fact the tag library seems to imply the same.  Yet the creation element
> also requires the name of the ead creator.  It seems that the author
> element under the eadheader could just as logically contain the name of
> the creator of the finding aid (which won't always be the same as the
> person who creates the ead instance).  We've seen one such example.
> Could someone comment on current practice?
>
> My second question relates to the use of rows in the dsc element.  We
> are using Panorama Pro to display our instances.  When we come to using
> the <c01> elements, followed by drow and dentry, we can't get a
> reasonable display on the screen; the columns are bunched up.  It is as
> if the column width attributes are ignored.  When we experimented with
> the table element the display was better.  Can any comment on how to
> edit the style sheet so that the row elements will format correctly?
>
> Thanks for any comments or advice from a group of novices!
>
> Dale Patterson
> Archivist/Records Administrator
> General Commission on Archives and History    [log in to unmask]
> United Methodist Church                       phone: (201) 408-3189
> Madison, NJ 07940                             FAX:   (201) 408-3909