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Suppose that you have a collection of 3500 items that has been completely digitized.  
Suppose that you do not wish to have 3500 <dao>'s in your EAD finding aid, but instead would prefer to provide a link that would fire off a search of your digital image system and retrieve all relevant items for each particular series or subseries,
Suppose, finally, that you do not wish to hard code a full URL of "http://very-very-very-long-string" but rather want to encode just the relevant search terms and let the style sheet construct the link.

Presumably you would still use <dao> for this, since these are digital versions of archival material in the collection.  But what attribute(s) of the <dao> would you use to encode the search terms?

For example, let's say this dao is intended to fire off a search of a digital collection called "Gerrit Smith" and bring up all the correspondence from 1850-1860.  Would this be a correct encoding, with the two search parameters in the href?

<c02>
   <did>
      <unittitle>Correspondence></unittitle>
      <unitdate normal="1850/1860">1850-1860</unitdate>
      <dao 
         linktype="simple" 
         role="http://digilib.syr.edu/Gerrit_Smith"
         href="type:correspondence;date:1850-1860" 
         actuate="onrequest" 
         show="new"/>
   </did>
</c02>

Also, if anyone has working examples of something like this please share.

Michele

Michele