Since the beta release of EAD3 in August of last year, the Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Description (TS-EAD) has been busy resolving issues, listening to community feedback, squashing bugs, and improving documentation. The gamma version of EAD3 was released last week. See http://www2.archivists.org/groups/technical-subcommittee-on-encoded-archival-description-ead/ead-revision-comments for more information and to log any comments.
Significant changes to EAD3 since the beta release include the following:
- For EAD3 <relations> will be considered an "experimental” element, and not included in the official schema. A separate schema is available that includes <relations> for those EAD implementations that choose to use it. This arrangement is a compromise between the desire to provide the more robust Linked Data functionality introduced by <relations> in EAC-CPF and the concerns that <relations> may duplicate functionality already available within <controlaccess> and that the successful implementation of <relations> may be dependent upon as yet undeveloped external vocabularies.
- The <table> model from EAD 2002 was restored.
- Pattern validation for date normalization attributes was removed. A separate Schematron schema will be provided for validating date attributes against ISO 8601. Patterns were removed to allow the use of alternate date normalization standards.
- To better support lightweight Linked Data applications, the <controlaccess> elements (persname, corpname, famname, name, subject, geogname, function, occupation, and title) were all given the following attributes:
- @source [URI or string for name of vocabulary from which term is taken]
- @rules [URI or string for rules by which a term is devised]
- @identifier [URI or string for the term]
- @relator [URI or string for a relator term, and a migration path for @role from EAD 2002, which is now removed from these elements, eliminating semantic collision with the xlink definition of @role]
- @localtype [URI or string for any other local subclassing]
- Within the <controlaccess> elements, which now consist of one or more <part> element, <part> now has the @source, @rules, and @identifier attributes available for post-coordinated terms which combine terms from multiple vocabularies.
- In response to beta feedback requesting the restoration of <daogrp>, we created <daoset> which wraps two or more <dao> elements. This acknowledges the need to bind multiple <dao> elements, but still eliminates the burdensome and little used extended linking model of <daogrp>.
- Within <dao>, <daodesc> was replaced with <descriptivenote>. This was done for simplicity: <descriptivenote> was already available elsewhere in the schema and it allows one or more <p>, rather than <daodesc>, which allows <head>, <list>, <table>, and other block elements, and for which we could find nearly zero evidence of use.
- Restored @langencoding, @scriptencoding, @dateencoding, @countryencoding, and @repositoryencoding to <control>. Each of those attributes may have either their default values from EAD 2002, or "other".
- Within <physdescstructured>, <physfacet> and <dimensions> can now occur in any order.
- Added @approximate (with values "yes" or "no") to <quantity>.
- Rejected proposals to make <quantity> optional.
- Enumerated element values for <publicationstatus>, <maintenancestatus>, <agenttype>, and <eventtype> were moved to a "value" attribute. to allow for alternate languages to be used in the elements themselves.
- <descriptivenote> was removed from <origination> and <repository> for lack of a use case.
- Added @coverage (with values "whole" or "part"> to <dao>.
- Adopted a CC0 license for the EAD3 schemas and migration stylesheet, CC-BY for the tag library.
- Created <foreign> for inline tagging of language and script.
- Added <geographiccoordinates> as a child of <geogname>
- Replaced all instances of <placeentry> with <geogname>.
For details on all bug fixes and minor changes see the GitHub issue tracker.
Mike Rush
TS-EAD co-chair