EAD RT Steering Team Minutes for 2014 December 1

EAD Roundtable

Notes for 2014 December 1

Present: Jodi Allison-Bunnell, Ruth Kitchin Tillman, Suzanne Maggard

Absent: Monish Singh, Laura Starratt

EAD FAQ

Ruth has Mike’s FAQ notes and permission to use them. Has put together all of the deprecated tags; Ruth has answered some of the tech questions. Suzanne’s schedule has been hectic.  Ruth is also trying to check in with Kelcy and TS-EAD.

Coordination on EAD3 release date, having these things go out together? Ruth has asked Kelcy Shepherd about this to some extent. Materials can be hosted on our microsite but should go out in their materials as links.

Reviewed FAQ, parceled out some questions to individuals.

DPLA Meeting

Monish and Jodi met with DPLA staff last week to discuss two possible initiatives: DPLA support for EAD and presentation of digital objects in collection context.

DPLA support for EAD: Monish asked DPLA about their level of interest in being the home of a standard template for EAD3 and in ingesting EAD into their discovery system.

Discussion: Is TS-EAD putting together a template as part of EAD3? This is one of the desired outcomes of the study groups: A national-level set of best practices that carries a template with it. The study groups are working on discovery, systems, and conversion; they are waiting for EAD3 to be released so they can do their work. Monish has identified a strong need; can we meet it primarily through the work of these groups? Yes, and integrating community feedback and creating good publicity is a big part of the answer.

DPLA providing collection-level context from EAD for digital objects: Jodi followed up on previous conversations with DPLA about drawing from EAD to provide context for digital objects. This is based on the successful user outcomes from the IMLS demonstration grant Archive Engine West (aew.orbiscascade.org), which pulled collection-level metadata for digital objects into a discovery interface. The project concluded that building this type of interface was best done on a national level rather than in a single organization.

Could this morph into EAD3 and digital objects? Yes, and this seems to be a strong direction for them and a strong interest. DPLA staff responded that this was a conversation they were already having and that they have an interest in pulling together a “brain trust” of people to work on this further.

Next steps:

·         Take a written proposal to DPLA on EAD and digital objects, asking to form “brain trust” of those working on EAD as context for digital objects

·         Take EAD support question to strong oversight of EAD3 study groups, helping them get on their work as soon as EAD3 is released. Loop OCLC Research into this question (Merrilee Profitt and Jennifer Schaffner).

Open Finding Aids

Group (Jennifer Schaffner, Adrian Turner, Jodi Allison-Bunnell) formed last month and is making progress: Problem statement formed, small working group in formation. Expect to have a statement encouraging a community of practice around open finding aid metadata by next summer.

Although this is not an official project of the RT, Jodi will continue to keep the RT leadership apprised on this project since it was a major topic of discussion at SAA last summer.