EAD Basics, Part 4:

Last post, I discussed the <ead> tag briefly. In that post I meantioned the <eadheader> tag was a required tag that was nested within the <ead> tag.

One thing I forgot to post then (which I will add to said post later, is the list of minimum required elements for an instance of EAD.

Moving to the <eadheader> tag, it's another wrapper element, another strictly structural tag. Because a lot of the identification and file description elements which it can contain are pretty vital to creating a searchable set of metadata, it itself is a required tag.

It can contain four subsequent elements (this being XML, the order they appear in is important):

<eadid> - mandatory

<filedesc> - mandatory

<profiledesc> - optional

<revisiondesc> - optional

In the vein of the minimum valid content example for the <ead> tag mentioned above, here is such an example for the <eadheader> tag:

<eadheader>
    <eadid>[...]</eadid>
    <filedesc>
        <titlestmt>
            <titleproper>[...]</titleproper>
        </titlestmt>
    </filedesc>
</eadheader>