On Thu, 20 Feb 1997, Richard Higgins wrote:

<excerpt>
> ... my
> only comment on the example given below is why not use  instead of the
> label attribute for <C03> and <C04>  the
> attributes level="box" and level="file" (or if you wish to use folder
> use otherlevel="folder" - I find otherlevel of
> especial use for "bundle" in estate records and "volume" where it is a
> bound  collection of several items....
</excerpt>

Rich Szary posted an interesting musing to this list in April of 1996
concerning the uses of the <c..> tags at Yale. In it he talked a bit
about the potential dangers of using the level attribute to record both
logical and physical groupings.  This made a lot of sense to me and I
have approached my tagging experiments with the notion that not using
level to record physical containment (box, folder, etc.) is a good
thing. Richard Higgins' tagging examples raise, for me, an interesting
question about whether "file" is being used to record intellectual or
physical containment.  I suspect that some international differences
about what we call the intellectual groups into which we subdivide our
fonds/record groups is at work in my lack of understanding about this.

I've ended up essentially following what I think Yale is doing, which is
to use the level attribute only for series/subseries.  For component
listings that record physical containment, I am using level=unspecified
and recording the information about the physical containment in the
<unitloc> tag.

I am eager to see some consensus emerge via this list and/or the LOC
documentation for EAD regarding how to approach these questions.  Aside
from looking at postings from this list that I've saved and downloading
raw SGML files to pick apart, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of
guidance for this.  There is certainly a danger here that the already
fragmented world of archival description will carry that fragmentation
through in its implementation of EAD, which would be unfortunate.

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