Through the original IMLS grant-funded project, the Mississippi Digital Library outsourced encoding of legacy finding aids to EAD markup. Some legacy finding aids were also encoded by USM personnel. Sample vendor specifications and tips for coordinating with a vendor will be added to this page at a later date.
Recognizing the limits of time and funding, each institution should prioritize their existing finding aids for EAD encoding. 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
- With an eye toward the future, participants in the Mississippi Digital Library have agreed to standard coding conventions, based on the RLG Best Practice Guidelines and established projects such as the Online Archive of California (OAC). Standard conventions allow the development of an EAD template that can be used by all Mississippi Digital Library participants. (See the element overview agreed upon by the original partner institutions.)
- Stylesheets to control display of your finding aids
(How do you want the final online finding aid to look?)
- 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.)
Resources
Official EAD Version 2002 website.
EAD Application Guidelines from the Official EAD website, Version 1.0. (Version 2.0 not yet available online.)
RLG EAD Support Site includes Best Practices Guidelines.
