 |
 |
Jennie, hi - I urge you to put together a MARAC session called "Elegant and Seamless" - make it a discussion session with some invited leaders to guide brainstorming over issues of length, hierarchies, stylesheets, navigation, etc. We all share the pain of large collections and complex finding aids. :-) Rebecca (reading from home where I dare not open your Agnew file) Jennie A. Levine wrote: > Michele, > I would be interested in responses to this as well, just as a point of > discussion. > > We've had several similar scenarios and dealt with each one differently. > We have one collection where we try to show both box and reel locations > by putting the reels and frames in the <physdesc> tag in the <c02> and > <c03> levels as appropriate. I don't know how "right" that is, but that > worked with our style sheet. The Guide to the Papers of Djuna Barnes > has about 2200 "rows" > > http://www.lib.umd.edu/archivesum/actions.DisplayEADDoc.do?source=/MdU.ead.litms.0021.xml&style=ead > > > (for example) > > I do think that is difficult to read on a screen, or even on a printout, > and not lose your place. We are working on revising our style sheets to > be more hierarchical in display to "solve" this problem (it's pretty > cool so far, actually, and I hope we'll be able to show people live in a > month or so - it's similar to the James Madison Carpenter Finding Aid > found here - http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/carpenter/browse.html), and > maybe change the print versions to list things like Series and Subseries > next to each item so that people can tell quickly where they are. > > Our Papers of Spiro T. Agnew guide is over 12,000 "rows" (only open if > you are certain of your browser stability and Internet connection...) > > http://www.lib.umd.edu/archivesum/actions.DisplayEADDoc.do?source=/MdU.ead.litms.0021.xml&style=ead > > > Series III, Subseries 5, which is even difficult to navigate to in our > current stylesheet, is a PDF, just to try to keep the finding aid from > crashing people's browsers. (You can do a "find" for "Subseries 3.5: to > find the link). > > I really dislike the way we had to handle this - it just feels awkward > to me. It wasn't too hard to make the PDF since all of our EAD data is > in database form, but still it was an extra step I'd like to avoid! And > I have seen other posts on this listserv with questions about elegant > and seamless ways to break up finding aids and am not sure if anyone > came up with any answers? If they did, I'd love to know! > > So, I don't have any answers - but I share your pain and am interested > in solutions people might have. > > Jennie >