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I am finding the response to my initial query illuminating. What I seem to be perceiving are at least two different intellectual approaches of interpreting the intellectual and physical "stuff" that we are all dealing with. On the one hand are archivists, myself included, who see the physical components of a collection as subordinate units of the intellectual hierarchy, implied or explicit, in a collection. On the other hand are archivists who see the intellectual information as one sort of hierarchy and the physical arrangement as a different hierarchy altogether. When I tag a document in the approach that I use, the intellectual hierarchy is paramount, but I use the appropriate <C01> ... <C09> tag to indicate which physical components are subordinate to that intellectual hierarchy. Michael Fox has made the argument that the approach I use "violates" the ARUP of the American Heritage project and of EAD itself. What has been reported to me since I raised this question is that two of the other three institutions in the American Heritage project are encoding their guides in the manner Stanford is. Only one is not. Does this mean that Stanford and the other two organizations are "right" and the fourth institution is "wrong"? Clearly not. However, I do think it suggests that there are real needs in many (most?) archives for showing that physical hierarchies are often part of an intellectual hierarchy and need to be represented as such explicitly. I would be ecstatic if physical component tags embedable within the intellectual hierarchy were defined or if the problem of concurrency could be resolved, but barring these solutions, I suspect that Stanford and other institutions will continue to use the existing <C01> ... <C09> tags for physical levels of hierarchy. ******************************** Steven Mandeville-Gamble Special Collections Librarian for Manuscripts Processing Dept. of Special Collections Stanford University Libraries Phone: (415) 725-3478 Fax: (415) 723-8690 Email: [log in to unmask] ********************************