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Greetings, EAD list, We've been using EAD to encode our finding aids for a couple of years now, and we've come to the general conclusion that it's best to avoid encoding information into head elements and label attributes; we'd rather use stylesheets for that. Archivists and curators working with various formats of material --even within a single division in the library -- have asked the encoding staff to use different wordings in the <head> element inside <bioghist>, as well as other elements, and that has reinforced our feeling that <head> and LABEL information really belongs in stylesheets. It's display information, not information that describes a collection. In the <bioghist> element, though, there's no TYPE or other appropriate attribute available to indicate whether the element is being used as a biographical note or an organizational history note. In order to distinguish between the two note types in <bioghist>, it seems we have no choice but to use the <head> element. Are we correct in this assumption? We could use the value "545 0" (the MARC indicator for "biographical sketch") or "545 1" (for "administrative history") in the ENCODINGANALOG attribute, but wouldn't it be cleaner encoding for the long term (as well as easier to understand) if a TYPE attribute were available in <bioghist> for this purpose? Am I missing something really obvious (it wouldn't be the first time)? Many thanks. Marsha Maguire Manuscripts and Special Collections Cataloging Librarian University of Washington Libraries P.O. Box 352900 Seattle, WA 98195 (206) 543-8407 Fax: (206) 685-8782 [log in to unmask]