Archival Description and Access After Finding Aids

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Archival Description and AccessAfter Finding
Aids
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Daniel Pitti Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities University of
Virginia November 2008
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Overview

• Traditional (print) archival access
• Reimagining Description and Access
• ICA and communication standards (EA)
• Where we are going
• Current status of transition
• Closer Look at EAC-CPF
• Final thought

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Traditional Description

• Finding aids (narrowly defined)
• Single print apparatus
• Provenance-based all records by a single creator
  treated as a unit
• A hierarchy of whole-part
• Components of description intertwined
• Example Rostovzeff (the old standby)

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EAD

• 1998, DTD, SGML and XML
• 2002, DTD, SGML and XML
• 2007, Schema, but conforming to 2002 DTD
• Currently EAD is about finding aids
• A single apparatus
• Render in print (classic finding aid)
• Render in browser

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Reimagining Description and Access (1)

• Rigorous analysis of the logic and structure of
  archival description
• Recognition of the functional inadequacy of
  single apparatus
• Increasing differentiation and formal definition
• Components of archival description
• Relations between components

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Reimagining Description and Access (2)

• Reimagining not entirely new
• Peter Scott, "The Record Group Concept  A Case
  for Abandonment"  American Archivist 29493-504
  (October 1966)
• Advanced technologies means to realizing
  description and access

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Components of Archival Description

• Description of records (as such)
• Context creators
• Context functions and activities documented in
  records
• Components interrelated with one another
• Dedicated descriptive semantics and structure for
  each component

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International Council on Archives and Encoded
Archival

• ISAD(G) / EAD (records 1994 2000)
• ISAAR(CPF) / EAC-CPF (context corporate bodies,
  persons, families 1994, 2003)
• ISDF / EAC-F (context functions 2008)
• ISDIAH / EAG (repository guide 2008)

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What We Need To Do

• Complete work on EAC-CPF and EAC-F
• Revise EAD
• Accommodate moving the present into the future
• EAD needs to accommodate EAC-CPF and EAC-F
  namespaces
• Simplify EAD
• Considerably less mixed content
• Move label and head to out-of-line, i.e.,
  make ltarchdescgt purely about description
• Make EA standards relational database friendly

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Current Status of Work

• EAC-CPF in draft
• Preliminary testing
• 109 MARC records gt XML Slim gt EAC-CPF
• Three Australian records
• Bright Sparcs gt EAC-CPF
• People Australia (ANL)
• EAC-CPF Tag library underway (multilingual)
• ISDF/EAC-F to follow
• EAD revise here, revise now!

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EACWG Members

• Anila Angjeli (BNF)
• Basil Dewhurst (ANL)
• Wendy Duff (Toronto)
• Hans-Joerg Lieder (SBB)
• Dennis Meissner (MHS)
• Victoria Peters (Glasgow)
• Daniel Pitti (Virginia)

• Chris Prom (Ill.)
• Jennifer Schaffner (OCLC)
• Bill Stockting (BL)
• Stefano Vitali (SAF)
• Kathy Wisser (UNC)
• Karin Bredenberg (SNA)
• Lina Bountouri (Athens)

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EAC-CPF (1)

• Authority control for corporate bodies, persons,
  and families but more
• Controlled vocabulary description of named entity
  (place, occupation and extensible)
• Prose biography or history of entity
• Chronological list (date, place, event)

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EAC-CPF (2)

• Designed to be relational database friendly
• Designed to be used in an international,
  multilingual, and shared environment
• Designed to enable ingesting and integrating
• Authority control records
• Biographies and histories
• From two or more sources
• Based on one or more sets of descriptive rules
• To provide union access

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EAC-CPF (3)

• Designed to provide access to resources in any
  form created by or about the same entity
• Archival records (of course)
• Books and journal articles
• Museum objects
• Whether Internet-accessible or not
• Designed to facilitate creation of organizational
  charts and family trees

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CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN!
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• If you would like to look at a diagram of the
  schema in its current draft, please visit the
  following web site
• http//www.iath.virginia.edu/dvp4c/eac-cpf/cpf.xs
  d.html