C.F.W. Coker Award: Remixing Archival Metadata Project (RAMP) by the University of Miami Libraries

The Remixing Archival Metadata Project (RAMP) by the University of Miami Libraries is the 2014 recipient of the C.F.W. Coker Award from SAA. The team members who worked on this project are: Tim Thompson, Matt Carruthers, Andrew Darby, David Gonzalez, and Jamie Little.

The C.F.W. Coker Award recognizes finding aids, finding aid systems, innovative development in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids. To merit consideration for the award, nominees must set national standards, represent a model for archives description, or otherwise have a substantial impact on national descriptive practice.

Over the years, the archives community has produced a body of detailed biographical descriptions that support access to the broader social and historical context surrounding archival and special collections. The emerging archival authorities format, EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context–Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families), provides a framework for encoding those descriptions and establishing a dialog between librarians and archivists regarding name authority control. The RAMP editor is a web-based tool for generating and disseminating EAC-CPF records. The RAMP editor successfully brings together librarians and archivists with a diverse range of skills around a project with a singular goal: to make descriptive work more accessible to the public by making archival description dynamic and reusable.

As one supporter noted, “The RAMP project is innovative because it allows for the enhancement and transformation of archival description into other useful forms beyond the traditional finding aid.”

Established in 1984, the award honors SAA Fellow C.F.W. Coker.