78 · Survey Results: Survey Questions And Responses
The impact of having an EAD record for the collection is high.
The main effect of EAD has been to make us more conscious of consistency when creating collection descriptions of
any level. We have also been able to separate the physical arrangement from the intellectual, which I think makes our
finding aids easier for the researcher to use. It may also slightly simplify processing, since we don’t have to worry about
where items will fall physically in the arrangement. Other than that, EAD has had very little effect on our processing —
we make decisions about priorities, arrangement, etc., just as we always did.
The use of the Web and EADs to make finding aids available required that we re-examine processing policies and
workflows. This led to a broader utilization of graduate students and paraprofessional staff to process collections.
There has been a steep “learning curve” in training varied staff and building the technical infrastructure to deliver EAD
records. At the same time, using EAD has advanced library-wide plans to exploit core metadata for use in the OPAC, a
digital content management system, and linking to digital objects.
This allows us to post the finding aids online so that they are more accessible. It is easy for the research room to use
these as well as patrons in house or off site.
Use of EAD has forced greater consistency in processing practices. I’m unaware of any limitations that have been
imposed.
We adjusted some processing policies to conform to EAD structure and online searching.
We are in the process of doing this now. It’s going to allow both staff and users to use our finding aids more efficiently.
It will be of great benefit in cataloging (we pull front matter from MARC records—now we’re working on the reverse).
And, quite frankly, it puts us on an equal footing with our professional peers. This can never be underestimated.
We do not currently use EAD, but are considering using either Archon or the Archivists’ Toolkit.
We do not use EAD. (6 responses)
We have become more aware of the need to describe contents in more detail, using more keywords and proper names.
We have minimal processing standards that enable collection level EAD encoding.
We have not done this in depth, though it is being explored at the moment. We have essentially all legacy finding aids,
lists, and catalogs converted to online html documents on one of two formats. Whether or not we EAD code, we would
like to move the html “parts” to a database structure, so we can separate “content” from a “delivery wrapper” and not
be tied to a format.
We have used EAD only for collections already processed to the item level.
We have witnessed an increase in reference since placing EAD finding aids on the Web and that has assisted in decision
making on processing priorities.
We mainly use EAD to allow for our finding aids to be shared/harvested by databases like Archive Grid. But because the
hierarchical description is more complex and time consuming with EAD we do not describe things with as much detail as
we did for PDFs or Word documents.
We only use EAD for ARCHEION.
We’ve actually done little of this and need to do far more. What we have done and what we have looked at to do has
shown us that many of our paper finding aids are not in great shape and need to be looked at.
When we make processing decisions, this is not important in our decision making.