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"ARUP" or "Acceptable Range of Uniform Practice" is something that is developing within the American Heritage Virtual Digital (or is it Digital Virtual?...whatever) Archives Project, i.e. Berkeley, Stanford, Virginia, and Duke as well as in the University of California project. It is an attempt to develop within EAD a uniform approach to tagging finding aids (or, perhaps more exactly, to explore the feasibility and implications of developing such a standard) within the context of building a union database of encoded finding aids. Given that there is a modest lack of unanimity even among this relatively small group on what constitutes "ARUP," it is my humble opinion that others should do as they wish and *not* be bound in any way by these standards. What is most important during the beta phase of EAD is that it be thoroughly tested, twisted, and stretched to the utmost in order to see just exactly what can be done with it and what needs to change. And, believe me, nobody should feel at all "UnARUP" if their own practice falls outside of the AHDVA guidelines. At this point, I suppose I should say that this is *my* opinion and in no way reflects the opinions of the other project participants. At the same time, given the flexibility built into the EAD DTD, it seems inevitable that "good practice" guidelines must someday develop both for finding aid content and structure and for sound markup, just as AACR2 and MARC support such principles in the cataloging world. But not quite yet. Steve Hensen ******************************************************* Steven L. Hensen Director of Planning and Project Development Special Collections Library Duke University Box 90185 Durham, NC 27708-0185 [log in to unmask] 919-660-5820 919-660-5934 (fax) *******************************************************