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Dear EAD listers, I am the Curator of an archives and manuscripts collection based at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. We collect archives and manuscripts from the both the University community and the wider community in our part of the country. The collection includes personal papers of many individuals, business records, school records, church records, sports clubs, University records, local associations and societies and everything in between! We currently have about 8000 linear metres of material. We use an AWAIRS software based product for collection management and arrangement and description, our version of the product is called Hakena. I joined the list a couple of weeks ago and have been reading the postings with interest since then. The reason I joined was so as to be able to learn more about the practicalities of EAD processing which is not used widely in this part of the world, yet. Obviously EAD has been or is being widely adopted in North America and Europe as a method of getting finding aids more widely available and searchable for researchers and seems to be becoming a standard. I have some questions about EAD and I hope that list members may share their thoughts; 1. Once you have the finding aid available in EAD, how do researchers go about requesting material? Is there a way to allow researchers to login to the system and put in call slips for items they want to use in the reading room? Or would you need a separate database to handle requests and issues? 2. How time consuming is the work of creating the EAD finding aids as compared to say creating the finding aid in a word processing package or spreadsheet or database? Are there any packages available that allow the process to happen more or less automatically or do staff have to key in all the code? 3. What are the benefits for both researchers and the archives institution in using EAD as opposed other methods of making finding aids more available? Thank you Anna Blackman Curator of Archives and Manuscripts The Hocken Collections University of Otago PO Box 56 Dunedin New Zealand ph 64 -03-4798867 fax 64-03-4795078 email:[log in to unmask] http://www.library.otago.ac.nz/libs/hocken/index.html