The Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Description (TS-EAD) and the Schema Development Team welcome comments on the alpha release of the revised EAD schema.

The alpha release is a rough revision of the EAD 2002 Relax NG schema. All major changes, barring significant further feedback, should be present. However, it has not been thoroughly tested, DTD and W3C schema versions are unavailable, migration tools have not been developed, and documentation is limited. What documentation is available is either in comments in the schema itself or in the closed issues in the GitHub repository where the schema is hosted.

All feedback is appreciated, be it bug reports, questions about new or revised elements, or general concerns. As TS-EAD and the Schema Development Team develop tools to assist with testing, we will share them with the community.

If you are a GitHub user, please submit comments on the alpha schema as issues in the EAD Revision repository.  If you are not a GitHub user, please submit your comments via a comment form on the SAA website.

The deadline for comments on the alpha version of the revised EAD schema is May 1, 2013. The beta version will be released, accompanied by documentation and draft migration tools, on July 1, 2013, and the beta comment period will close on September 1, 2013. The final version is expected to be released early in Winter 2014.

Sincerely,

Mike Rush, TS-EAD Co-chair