Through this grant-funded effort we will establish a finding aid database from EAD records to serve as the basis for a sustained effort to provide union searching of archival holdings in Mississippi . The participants will present the EAD finding aids for public display as HTML using an XSLT style sheet to facilitate the conversion. Each finding aid will prominently display the name and/or logo of the contributing repository.

The grant calls for EAD conversion of existing finding aids for civil rights materials from all six participating institutions. Where full finding aids exist already, participants will outsource EAD markup. Some participating institutions have received sub-contracts that may include funding for EAD conversion. However, centralizing the outsourcing of finding aid conversion will be more cost- and time-efficient, and will help to ensure consistent quality, especially since the ultimate goal is a central union database of finding aids. ( Information about outsourcing EAD can be found online in the EAD Application Guidelines, Section 2.6.) Where full finding aids do not yet exist, the Field Archivist will create at least collection-level EAD and OAI records.

Recognizing the limits of time and funding, each institution should prioritize their existing finding aids for civil rights materials. Help for this task can be found online in the EAD Application Guidelines, Section 2.5.4.1.

In addition, each repository will need to answer the following questions, most of which can be found (with many others) in the EAD implementation checklist.

• In what physical format are your finding aids? (It is easier and cheaper to work from Word or Wordperfect documents, but finding aids in other formats can be converted too.)
• How complete are they? How much confidence do you have in the accuracy of the information they contain?
• How consistent are the structural components of your finding aids and the data they contain? How clearly are the components labeled?
• Are there extraneous notes or other marks on/in the finding aids that are important? Should these notes be ignored or incorporated during the conversion process?
• What guidelines have you followed for the construction of your finding aids?
• How many finding aids do you have that you would immediately or eventually wish to convert to EAD? How many pages of text do they represent?
• At what rate are you currently producing new finding aids?
• Does your repository currently create MARC records, and, if so, what is the relationship of those records to your finding aids?
• What local conventions will you need to develop?
  • Standard format that all your finding aids will follow
  • Standard ways of entering data into specific elements (USM grant staff will work with you on this.)
  • Stylesheets to control display of your finding aids (USM will provide these, with your input.)
  • Authoritative forms for search terms not covered by standard authority sources. (As part of a prior project, USM Created a Civil Rights in Mississippi Thesaurus to provide a standardized list of names and terms for use in metadata records of items related to the civil rights movement in Mississippi.)

With an eye toward the future, it would be an advantage for participants in the Mississippi Digital Library to agree to standard coding conventions. Standard conventions would allow the development of an EAD template that could be used by all participants after grant funding has ended. A Working Group will be formed to construct these conventions, most likely based on the RLG Best Practice Guidelines and established projects such as the Online Archive of California (OAC).

Resources

Official EAD Version 2002 website.

EAD Application Guidelines from the Official EAD website, Version 1.0. (Version 2.0 not yet available online.)

• Administrative Considerations (Chapter 2)
• Minimum Recommended Finding Aid Elements (Appendix A)
• Implementation Checklist (Appendix D)

RLG EAD Support Site includes Best Practices Guidelines.