EAD and EAC: Where are we now?

Bill Stockting, British Library and Co-chair of TS-EAD

UKAD Forum, TNA, 2nd March 2011

Introduction

Today simply a brief update on:

Encoded Archival Description – Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families: EAC-CPF

Encoded Archival Description: EAD

These being the XML standards for electronic capture, presentation and navigation of descriptions of archives and those creating (or otherwise acting in them) and the relationships between them. For us this means descriptions that conform respectively to:

ISAD(G)

ISAAR(CPF)

Encoded Archival Context - Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families: EAC-CPF

EAC-CPF version 1.0 published in March 2010:

Jointly maintained by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and Staatsbibliothek Berlin

SAA has now formally adopted the standard and created the Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Context (TS-EAC-CPF) of the Standards Committee

Official site Staatsbibliothek Berlin http://eac.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/

EAC-CPF: Official Site

EAC-CPF: ISAAR(CPF) as XML

EAC-CPF is ISAAR(CPF) XML so captures:

Control information

Identity: authorised name and other names

Life, family or administrative histories

Relationships to other CPF entities and resources of all sorts

Examples…

SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project

SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project

National Library of Australia: TROVE

National Library of Australia: TROVE

Encoded Archival Description - EAD

Change in the governance for EAD as well:

EAD Working Group replaced by Technical Subcommittee of SAA – TS-EAD

Actual development to be undertaken by joint Schema Development Team (SDT) which also has responsibility for EAC-CPF

TS-EAD charged with producing a revision of EAD by early 2014

EAD 2002

EAD 2002 has continued the story of success for the standard:

Global implementation in repositories big and small

Particular adoption for federated services: e.g.s Archives Hub in UK, APEnet the developing European portal for archives

Translation of the tag library into many languages including Cantonese!

EAD 2002

But also many changes which make revision overdue:

Standards developments: DACS; ISAAR(CPF) v2 and EAC-CPF

Database and mark-up technologies, especially XML and related technologies

Semantic Web and linked data concepts and technologies

User contribution and creation of catalogues and resources

EAD Revision timetable

October 2010 - February 2011:  Global call for comments

August 2011: Forum(s) for discussion at SAA Annual Meeting

Spring 2012: Working meeting(s) of TS-EAD, SDT etc (subject to funding)

December 2012: Release of draft schema for testing and comment

August 2013: Publish revised version at SAA Annual Meeting

EAD: A Radical Revision?

Early days but it looks like a radical revision! Hopefully EAD will:

Be less complex and easier to teach and use

Work better with databases: less formatting and mixed content (tagging within tags)?

Allow clear and useful expression of relationships with other: cultural heritage resources (not just archives) CPF entities with any role (not just creator)

Allow data from other XML namespaces such as MARC

Deal with places better and allow capture of geocoding

Conform to latest XML practice

Contact

Bill Stockting: British Library

william.stockting@bl.uk