EAD Roundtable Meeting Minutes 2012

Annual Meeting of the SAA EAD Roundtable, August 8, 2012

Welcome and introductions (Mark Matienzo and Hillel Arnold, EADRT Co-chairs) 

Election results

Mark Custer elected as incoming co-chair for 2012-2014. 
 

EAD Help Pages transition to EADRT site and other resources

The EAD Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists (EAD RT) has migrated content out of the EAD Help Pages to several new locations to allow for better maintenance and delineation of “official” content related to the standard, resources maintained by the community, and resources maintained by the EAD RT. Content formerly included within the EAD Help Pages has been relocated to the official EAD website hosted by the Library of Congress, the EAD Roundtable’s website, or the SAA Standards Portal.

The decision to migrate the content from the EAD Help Pages was motivated by several factors, the most notable of which was the results of a 2010 survey of the EAD RT membership. There has been continuing difficulty of maintaining the website in its current form (static HTML, CSS, and some XML/XSLT). Given SAA’s adoption of the Drupal content management system, the EAD RT leadership elected to utilize it for ease of maintenance.

Content relating to the EAD standard itself, including introductory text, schema and DTD documentation, and tag library translations, has been migrated to the official EAD website at http://www.loc.gov/ead/. This website is maintained by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress. We are continually grateful for their ongoing support of providing information about EAD.

Content relating specifically to the EAD RT, such as news, officers, meeting minutes and agendas, as well as select tools and resources maintained or hosted by the EAD RT, has been moved to the Roundtable’s website at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/encoded-archival-description-ead-round.... Resources maintained or hosted by the EAD RT include the EAD Bibliography, User-Contributed Stylesheets, the EAD 1.0 to 2002 Conversion package, and the EAD Cookbook. Upon request, the EAD RT can provide hosting for stylesheets or other tools using our organizational account on Github, a source code hosting platform.

Information on implementation of EAD, including best practice guidelines, links to tools hosted by their creators, and the like, has been moved to or linked from the SAA Standards Portal at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/technical-subcommittee-on-encoded-arch... . The SAA Standards Portal allows anyone with an SAA web account to submit resources to the Standards Portal. More information on the Standards Portal can be found online at http://www2.archivists.org/standards.

Some of the content on the EAD Help Pages was outdated or duplicated elsewhere and was not migrated. This includes some tools and helper files for earlier versions of EAD. Based on the 2010 survey of the EAD RT membership, the Roundtable’s leadership decided not to migrate the EAD Implementer listings. In that survey, the Implementer listings ranked low in terms of perceived value as well as actual use on the EAD Help Pages.

It is our hope that the newly reorganized content will continue to grow with submissions from the community. Please contact the leadership of the EAD RT if you have any questions or suggestions regarding our web content.

Creation of bylaws (new requirement by SAA Council)

  As part of SAA’s updated requirements for component groups, all Roundtables are now required to have bylaws. Since the EADRT does not already have these in place, the Steering Committee will be working to develop these bylaws, and members should be aware that their input on these bylaws will be requested in the near future.

Call for business from the floor

No business items were announced from the floor.

Announcements

NHPRC (Nancy Melley)

NHPRC is encouraging applications in its Documenting Democracy program for retrospective description conversion to EAD. In addition, it is announcing a new grant program called Innovations in Archives and Documentary Editing, which could be a way to fund a project to, among other ideas, develop an application that will ease the conversion process.

OCLC Research (Merrilee Proffitt)

Linked Open Data: "Linked data" describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. As the first practical expression of the semantic Web, linked data has become the state-of-the-art way to expose, share, and connect data so that it can be shared and reused across applications, enterprises, and community boundaries. For example, data created by archives can become reusable by those working in other domains. OCLC has been at the leading edge of publishing its core data as linked data for quite some time. In June 2012, we dramatically increased exposure of linked data resources by making WorldCat.org bibliographic metadata available in this form. In addition, the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) and Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) have been published as linked data. The WorldCat.org linked data is published under an Open Data Commons (ODC-BY) and is openly usable by all. More information: http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/linkeddata/default.htm

VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is a collaborative project of several national libraries and is operated by OCLC Research. Its aim is to link each national name authority file (such as that of the Library of Congress) to a single virtual authority file. In VIAF, identical records from the different data sets are linked together so that a user can see the many forms of a name and its cross references that are used worldwide. The data are available online as linked open data and are available for research and data exchange/sharing. VIAF currently has 22 million clusters presenting personal and corporate names contributed by 22 sources from 19 countries, primarily national libraries, but also other sources such as the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artists Names. Work is underway to create reciprocal links between VIAF and Wikipedia; VIAF currently has about 250,000 links to Wikipedia that are widely used. VIAF was one of the first library implementations of linked data. More information: http://www.oclc.org/us/en/viaf/

ArchiveGrid: ArchiveGrid makes primary sources quick and easy to find on the web. It is freely available-no subscription necessary. From one simple, intuitive search box, researchers have access to more than 1.7 million detailed descriptions of archival collections held by thousands of archives, libraries, museums, and historical societies worldwide. Over the past year, OCLC Research has made improvements to the interface, added many new contributors, harvested thousands of additional descriptions, enabled contribution of finding aids in PDF and Word, and launched a companion blog. Search ArchiveGrid: http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/

NARA (Jerry Simmons)

The National Archives and Records Administration announces the formation of an EAD vision group to explore EAD implementation. The group includes staff from the Standards and Authorities Team in the newly formed Innovation Office and representatives from all custodial divisions agency wide. The group plans an EAD training event at NARA for Winter 2013, and hopes to update the SAA annual meeting next August in New Orleans.

CDL (Adrian Turner)

The California Digital Library (CDL) has released a new version of XTF (http://xtf.cdlib.org/), an open source platform that it utilizes for the Online Archive of California for searching, browsing, and displaying finding aids. Version 3.1 now has improved handling of schema-based EAD finding aids, and also better support for EAD outputs from the Archivists' Toolkit and Archon. See the XTF webpages for more information, and to download the latest release.

The CDL is also conducting an exploratory study to assess the need for finding aid hosting and publication services beyond California. To date, the Online Archive of California has been focused on providing services to institutions within the state; we are exploring the degree to which we may be able to assist institutions and consortia outside of California. We'd like to invite representatives at individual archival repositories and statewide or regional consortia, responsible for EAD finding aid publication, to help us assess hosting and publication needs by completing a brief survey -- it'll be available through next month: http://oac.cdlib.org/survey)

Building a National Archival Authority Cooperative (Kathy Wisser)

The Building a National Archival Authority Cooperative project would like to remind folks of the availability of scholarships for the Society of American Archivists' Encoded Archival Context - Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families workshops. This is funded through IMLS and supports the registration to various regional EAC-CPF workshops. Three workshops have been held to date, but there are plenty of scholarships left. Upcoming workshops include one in Princeton, NJ in late October, 2012 and a workshop in Washington D.C. in March 2013. We are also working on scheduling a workshop in the Northwest region, the Southeast and the Northeast in 2013. The application process is easy! Information on the dates and scholarship applications are available through the SAA workshop schedule. We encourage everyone to take advantage of this wonderful and unique continuing education opportunity!

The EADRT yielded the rest of the timeslot to TS-EAD to provide a forum on the EAD Revision process. Presentation (by Bill Stockting and Mike Rush) is linked below.

EAD Revision Process