Hi Jennifer,
How long is long? The
biggest finding aid that we currently have is still under 3 MB, and I
wouldn’t want to break it up (at least not the canonical view of that
page/finding aid). I personally like to equate a single finding aid with
one (possibly) long scroll (but I understand the opposing view as well, and I
nevertheless think that some delivery options will change if EAC gains
widespread adoption). Of course, I’m sure that there are EADs out
there that easily exceed what most email clients would permit as an email attachment,
so those might have other concerns.
One of the reasons that I like
the “single scroll” approach, though, is because I often access
finding aids straight from an external search engine (and it’s much
easier to figure out where I land if everything’s contained therein).
The flipside of this, though, is that those very same search engines only index
up to a certain, set limit (I’ve seen past quotes as low as 150 KB, but I
just did a quick, informal test, and both Google and Bing have indexed one of
our finding aids up very close to the 1 MB milestone; but after that, there’s
nothing). So, I wouldn’t expect Google to index everything (and
researchers, of course, would need to make use of the tools that we provide at
the site level anyhow), and it just goes back to the fact that it’s best
to have a finding aid with an excellent, narrative description.
Alternatively, I wouldn’t use the “search engine index-limit”
as an argument for breaking up the traditional view of a finding aid, since I’m
sure that there are container list series out there that also exceed that limit
(in short, I wouldn’t try to break everything up just so that you think
that everything will be indexed by a search engine).
If delivery/size is an issue,
though, my guess is that it would be advisable to follow Yale’s route if
you want to separate the finding aid (that way, you wouldn’t always have
to create multiple EAD files for a single collection; you’d just be
portioning out the sections that you define).
This begs the question:
what’s the biggest EAD online right now (and wouldn’t it be nice if
there were an easy way to figure this out)? The largest one that I know
of is for the Hugh Morton collection at UNC: http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/pcoll/P0081/P0081.html
(it’s HTML version is getting close to 8 MB, and it still has a long way
to grow before it’s complete).
Mark Custer
From: Encoded Archival
Description List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Betts, Jennifer
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 4:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Long finding aids
Hello all,
Are there any repositories out there who are separating long
finding aids into separate EAD files? If so, would you mind sharing your
documentation of that process? I have an idea of how we might do it, but
would like to see how other repositories are handling this.
Best wishes,
Jennifer
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Jennifer
J. Betts
RIAMCO
Project Manager
John Hay Library, Box A
E-MAIL:
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TEL:
(401) 863-2148