68 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
“Right now, we have some finding aids marked up in EAD, but we aren’t using the EAD versions to provide access
online for a variety of reasons. The special knowledge required for creating EAD finding aids and making their
presence on our Web site effective has been an impediment to us backing the effort fully. We are considering
implementing Archivists’ Toolkit with XTF as a means for serving up the EAD finding aids online, but this hasn’t
happened yet.”
“Since our finding aids have been available on the Web for quite some time, first as plain HTML documents and
then as EADs, I don’t think we’ve realized any particular benefit to changing the format, except perhaps that
the finding aids look neater. Our researchers were finding our collections through search engines prior to the
conversion.”
“The benefit definitely equals the time and effort. We have seen increased access, and more specific questions for
those collections with online finding aids.”
“The benefits definitely outweigh the time and effort required to tag documents in EAD. We are currently
developing an in-house tool to streamline the gathering of information about manuscript collections and one of
the components will be the automatic generation of EAD tagging (for more information see http://www.lib.byu.
edu/indi ).”
“The creation of new finding aids in EAD is no more complicated or time consuming than those created in any
other format. We have found the potential for searching and multi-purposing, ease of mounting on the Web
(when we started word processed documents were not Web-accessible) and subsequent tracking to have been of
great benefit.”
“The searchability of the finding aids along with the potential for sharing across repository lines makes EAD
worth the time and effort. Through the creation of a basic template, we are able to let student workers write
their finding aids in EAD, meaning that they are taking little more time than it would have taken to type the
information into a word processing document.”
“There’s no way to easily measure the ‘benefits ’ however it would be irresponsible to not encode our finding
aids.”
“Time and effort surpasses the benefit for both researchers and staff of SCUA.”
“To researchers, yes!”
“We are experimenting with EAD at the present.”
“We create EAD programmatically. We do not mark-up ‘by hand.’”
“We currently use an EAD template that does not require any added effort. However, I have yet to see what, if
any, benefit is derived from the EAD metadata. All of our finding-aids are posted on the Web in html and that’s
what the patrons find. EADs are submitted to a statewide database that gets virtually no use.”
“We experimented very briefly about 10 years ago with EAD markup and maintain only a few legacy documents
from that period. No recent effort has been made to EAD finding aids.”
“We feel it will be very beneficial and has helped us to make our finding aids more uniform in structure.”
“We have only marked up about five collections in EAD on a limited basis as a test project.”
“Right now, we have some finding aids marked up in EAD, but we aren’t using the EAD versions to provide access
online for a variety of reasons. The special knowledge required for creating EAD finding aids and making their
presence on our Web site effective has been an impediment to us backing the effort fully. We are considering
implementing Archivists’ Toolkit with XTF as a means for serving up the EAD finding aids online, but this hasn’t
happened yet.”
“Since our finding aids have been available on the Web for quite some time, first as plain HTML documents and
then as EADs, I don’t think we’ve realized any particular benefit to changing the format, except perhaps that
the finding aids look neater. Our researchers were finding our collections through search engines prior to the
conversion.”
“The benefit definitely equals the time and effort. We have seen increased access, and more specific questions for
those collections with online finding aids.”
“The benefits definitely outweigh the time and effort required to tag documents in EAD. We are currently
developing an in-house tool to streamline the gathering of information about manuscript collections and one of
the components will be the automatic generation of EAD tagging (for more information see http://www.lib.byu.
edu/indi ).”
“The creation of new finding aids in EAD is no more complicated or time consuming than those created in any
other format. We have found the potential for searching and multi-purposing, ease of mounting on the Web
(when we started word processed documents were not Web-accessible) and subsequent tracking to have been of
great benefit.”
“The searchability of the finding aids along with the potential for sharing across repository lines makes EAD
worth the time and effort. Through the creation of a basic template, we are able to let student workers write
their finding aids in EAD, meaning that they are taking little more time than it would have taken to type the
information into a word processing document.”
“There’s no way to easily measure the ‘benefits ’ however it would be irresponsible to not encode our finding
aids.”
“Time and effort surpasses the benefit for both researchers and staff of SCUA.”
“To researchers, yes!”
“We are experimenting with EAD at the present.”
“We create EAD programmatically. We do not mark-up ‘by hand.’”
“We currently use an EAD template that does not require any added effort. However, I have yet to see what, if
any, benefit is derived from the EAD metadata. All of our finding-aids are posted on the Web in html and that’s
what the patrons find. EADs are submitted to a statewide database that gets virtually no use.”
“We experimented very briefly about 10 years ago with EAD markup and maintain only a few legacy documents
from that period. No recent effort has been made to EAD finding aids.”
“We feel it will be very beneficial and has helped us to make our finding aids more uniform in structure.”
“We have only marked up about five collections in EAD on a limited basis as a test project.”
