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Hello, I'd like to introduce a new project underway to test implementation of the EAD in a museum setting, specific issues of EAD's application to pictorial and object collections, and integrated access to museum/archive/library collections. This is a museum/library collaboration project under the auspices of the California Digital Library's "Online Archive of California" (formerly UC-EAD project), and co-managed by Tim Hoyer of the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library and myself, Richard Rinehart of the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. This testbed project involves 8 institutions of very different sizes, collections holdings and technical expertise in order to test real-world issues of collaboration and scalability. I would love to hear any feedback or ideas from this group as to issues we should be addressing, related projects we should know about, and generally any input. The project has a website with a brief and a full project description, as well as links to some existing instances of museum and pictorial or object collections accesss using EAD. It's at http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/moac/ This description below is taken from the website: Museums and the Online Archive of California Project (MOAC), will investigate one of the most serious problems facing knowledge seekers everywhere, the geographic distribution and limited access to the collections of unique materials -- primary sources for research in all areas of our cultural heritage -- that are held in libraries, museums, and archives around the world. We propose to solve this problem by creating a prototype "virtual museum archive" that integrates standardized "finding aids" for museum and library special collections into a single source, thus providing access to collections held by archives, museums, and libraries throughout the state of California. We will create this prototype within an existing online union database of finding aids, the Online Archive of California (OAC), which is being developed as a primary resource for the public, schools, and universities, enabling cross-disciplinary education and research. The OAC employs Encoded Archival Description (EAD), the standard for archival finding aids (in the form of an SGML DTD) supported by the Society of American Archivists and maintained by the Library of Congress, which will be evaluated for providing collection-level access in the museum community. The MOAC prototype within the OAC will be comprised of EAD finding aids for 20 collections, including 35,000 item records and images. Five California museums (the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the Oakland Museum of California, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, and the UCR/California Museum of Photography) will join the Bancroft Library in developing the testbed. Two other museums (Stanford University Art Museum, Fowler Museum of Cultural History), which will not actively participate in the grant, will also contribute collections to the testbed. Richard Rinehart ---------------- Information Systems Manager & Education Technology Specialist Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive @ University of California http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/ ---------------- & President-Elect, Museum Computer Network, http://www.mcn.edu/