I've published at: http://rubyforge.org/projects/eadcodec/ a library to import/export EAD files into Ruby objects. It doesn't support all of the elements in EAD because I haven't gotten around to it yet, but adding an element is a very simple thing to do. Besides being able to import/export whole files to and from memory it can also process them in pieces. This was developed for the Portuguese national archives and I've created/imported EAD files with 100MB with no problems. The library is licensed under the LGPL. Greetings, Pedro CĂ´rte-Real.