Encoded Archival Description (Ead)

Another SGML application that has attracted a lot of attention in the scholarly community and archival world is the Encoded Archival Description (EAD). First developed by Daniel Pitti at the University of California at Berkeley and now taken over by the Library of Congress, the EAD is an SGML application for archival finding aids.^[9] Finding aids are very suitable for SGML because they are basically hierarchic in structure. In simple terms, a collection is divided into series, which consist of boxes, which contain folders, and so on. Prior to the EAD, there was no effective standard way of preparing finding aids. Typical projects created a collection level record in one of the bibliographic utilities, such as RLIN, and used their own procedures, often a word-processing program, for creating the finding aid. Possibilities now exist for using SGML to link electronic finding aids with electronic representations of the archival material itself. One such experiment, conducted at the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH), has created an EAD-encoded finding aid for part of the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University and has encoded a small number of the items in the collection (nineteenth-century essays) in the TEI scheme.^[10] The user can work with the finding aid to locate the item of interest and then move directly to the encoded text and an image of the text to study the item in more detail. The SGML browser program Panorama allows the two DTDs to exist side by side and in fact uses an extended pointer mechanism devised by the TEI to move from one to the other.