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Hi Michele,

We've never used NoteTAb, so I can't comment on that, but I do find some students struggle with the 
tags and the whole concept of EAD, so anything that makes it easier is a help.

We do quite a bit of this sort of teaching, and have used XMetal, Oxygen and our own EAD Editor. 
We've also had to resort to marking up in notepad because the venue didn't allow us to load any 
software. That was kind of interesting!

Using something like Oxygen always seems best, because its more visual and provides more help, which 
is useful for students when it is their first experience of EAD.

cheers,
Jane.

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Jane Stevenson

Archives Hub Co-ordinator
Mimas
University of Manchester
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Creighton Barrett wrote:
> On 6 May 2010 12:13, Michele R Combs <[log in to unmask] 
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
> 
>     I'm going to be teaching a one-day workshop on EAD encoding this
>     summer and am debating with myself whether it's better to use a
>     full-featured XML editor like oXygen, or go with something like
>     NoteTab Pro or Notepad++ that just provides some general (mostly
>     visual) XML assistance.  I've used Notepad++ in the past with
>     students in our LIS classes with pretty good success.  I can think
>     of fairly obvious pros and cons for both approaches.  I'd appreciate
>     your thoughts, particularly from anyone who has taught similar
>     workshops.
> 
> 
> I've never taught a workshop like this, but I did train some interns on 
> EAD this past year and my experience was that they all preferred oXygen 
> over NoteTab.  I started one intern on NoteTab and when she started 
> using oXygen in a text-design course, she came back to the archives 
> baffled about why I would prefer NoteTab over oXygen.  When you're not 
> used to the hierarchical structure of the code and how to detect the 
> errors on your own in NoteTab and a web browser, the error-highlighting 
> features of oXygen become very handy. 
> 
> oXygen, of course, also has features that might make it easier to refer 
> to different things when you're talking to a large group, like 
> color-coded code and collapsible sections.  And it transforms...  If 
> you're teaching students, there is a pretty good student rate to 
> purchase a license if they want to pursue things further. 
> 
> Just a few thoughts!
> 
> Creighton Barrett
> Halifax, Nova Scotia