Megan,
That's a great response, you make many good points. When I read the original post at
avperserve.com, it appears to be a criticism of EAD implementation and not of EAD as an encoding/structure standard itself. There's plenty of room in EAD to have detailed item description, just because it may not happen in one particular archive as part of processing is not the fault of EAD, but an issue of planning and management of processing resources.
Of course, it also helps tremendously to have a content management system where one can go into as much detail as desired for preservation and digitization. In our case, we use AXAEM which outputs EAD for finding aids and MARC catalog records from one database.
Gina Strack
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Arrangement & Description
Utah State Archives & Records Service
http://archives.utah.gov
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