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).