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Hi Anne-Marie –

 

This question of how to retain/convey context when retrieving pieces of a finding aid, rather than the entire document, is a good one.  EAD doesn’t specify much in the way of content, since it’s a structural standard rather than a content standard (DACS or ISAD(G) would be a content standards).  So theoretically you’re free to use the unittitle element however you want.  However, it’s important to bear in mind that both DACS and EAD discourage repeating information at lower levels in the hierarchy, capitalizing instead on the concept of inheritance – that is, lower-level elements are assumed to inherit information from their parent elements.  So in the following (greatly abbreviated!!) example, the series title “Photographs” is not repeated in the lower-level unittitles, nor is the subseries “Personal.”

 

<c01><unittitle>Photographs

            <c02><unittitle>Business

<c02><unittitle>Personal

                        <c03><unittitle>Family

                        <c03><unittitle>Friends

            <c02><unittitle>Recreational

    

So a better choice would be to encode the EAD appropriately, without repetition, and handle it via the search and/or indexing.  Depending on the technology you’re using for your search, the information displayed in your search results isn’t necessarily limited to what’s in the unittittle.  For example, the search could perhaps be constructed such that, for a given item in the list of results returned, it displays both that unittitle and all ancestor unittitles up to the <c01> level.  So the search results for the example above could be displayed as:

 

Photographs: Personal: Friends

 

Of course this depends on your being able to customize your search technology.  I’m not sure what you mean about modifying the style sheet to display search results, but an XSL style sheet can certainly capture information higher up the document tree (ancestor, parent, sibling, etc.)  Alternatively, whatever you’re using to index your EAD might be capable of grabbing that information during indexing and store the full string of unittitles, to be displayed as needed.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Michele

 

 

From: Encoded Archival Description List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Anne-Marie Viola
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 9:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Forming unittitles

 

I am working with the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) to implement ICA's Atom archival access system. My colleague and I are trying to decide how to form our unittitles, given that the search engine will enable users to locate records outside of the record hierarchy. A simple solution to provide better context would be to include the names of each record's series in the search results but we are unsure if we can modify the stylesheet to do so.

Assuming we cannot, is there any recent EAD guidance on how much description to include in the unittitle?

Thanks!
--
Anne-Marie Viola
Project Intern
International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration
of Cultural Property (ICCROM)
Rome, Italy
http://www.iccrom.org