My final metadata blog post (for classes, at least).

This semester has been a truly fascinating experience. I've learned a heck of a lot in all my classes, and this one is far from an exception. And so, I suppose in honor of the ignorance I entered this particular semster, I will post a few videos I found, one of which sums up the general public's perception of what this class is about.

What the public thinks metadata means:

And then part of what we learned it means:

I hope that in this respect, I can at least leave y'all with a laugh this semester. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go brush on speaking Alabama.

More Archival repositories I found while researching my EAD presentation.

Calames is an online, multi-institutional repository of archives and manuscripts contained in French University and Research libraries. It defaults to a keyword search with the option to narrow by what library or libraries.


And then there's Archives Hub. It's a multi-institutional repository in the UK. I'd give more information on it, but frankly, the sheer breadth of it is amazing. I sincerely doubt you could log onto that and fail to find at least one participating collection you found fascinating.

In my case, these were the ones that caught my attention:

• D H Lawrence Collection
• Cor, blust, squit! Dialects and accents of the British Isles contains everything need to know to research English dialectic. (Just in case you want your fake British accent to be authentic).
• There's the collection of finding aids entitled A Cabinet of Curiosities and Curiouser and Curiouser for people who prefer their archives weird.

Was looking for EAD instance examples and found a few that were interesting.

Apparently worldcat is demoing find-an-archives function entitled archivegrid. It...well, either archives are under-reported among their sources in Alabama, or they're being very specific about what qualifies.

See for yourself.

The making of a finding aid.

Having come across the Here and There blog elsewhere on this site, one of her posts caught my attention in relation to the investigation into EAD I've been doing lately.

In this case, it's her description of creating a finding aid for historical records about a N.J. landfill. In it, she goes through her process of encountering the problem and creating the aid. I thought it was interesting that she mentioned a different content standard which she used for finding aids. Apparently the standard DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard), uses bits of MARC and bits of EAD encoding in it. It was interesting to read about and, best of all: she provides a link to the finished aid.

EAD, the semantic web, and archives

I was looking about for more EAD resources and discovered a number of ones I found interesting. One of them was this discussion on Encoded Archival Description, the semantic web, and archives:

Note: the video above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license by Debra Schiff for the Here and There blog.

That blog is located here.

EAD Basics 8: Archival Description

The <archdesc> tag brackets the bulk of an EAD instance. All of the contents of your finding aid are included in this. As is managerial and supplemental information. Info is organized in unfolding levels of hierarchy that give a descriptive overview and allow it to be followed with detailed information about the parts of the whole. That particular set of detailed information is included in the <dsc> tag, which stands for Description of Subordinate Components. For obvious reasons, there is not a provided example of this tag being used in its entirety outside of the fully encoded examples of all of EAD avaiable in Appendix C to the LoC site's Tag Library (from whence the bulk of the information and examples in this introductional series of blog posts came).

EAD Basics 7: Title Page

The tag <titlepage> groups together the finding aid's bibliographic information. Things such as addresses, author, block quotations, dates, edition, volume number, publisher, sponsor, subtitles, and the actual title of the finding aid.

It occurs inside the <frontmatter> tag.

An example:

<frontmatter>
        <titlepage>
            <titleproper>Inventory of The Arequipa Sanatorium Records,
            <date>1911&ndash;1958</date></titleproper>
            <num type="Collection number:">BANC MSS 92/894 c</num>
            <publisher>The Bancroft Library<lb/>University of California,
             Berkeley<lb/>Berkeley, California
            </publisher>
            <list type="deflist">
                <defitem>
                    <label>Processed by:</label>
                    <item>Lynn Downey</item>
                </defitem>
                <defitem>
                    <label>Completed by:</label>
                    <item>Mary Morganti and Katherine Bryant</item>
                </defitem>
                <defitem>
                    <label>Date Completed:</label>
                    <item><date>May 1994</date></item>
                </defitem>
                <defitem>
                    <label>Encoded by:</label>
                    <item>Gabriela A. Montoya</item>
                </defitem>
            </list>
            <p>&copy; 1996 The Regents of the University of California.
            All rights reserved.</p>
        </titlepage>
    </frontmatter>