apeEAD

The use of EAD in the Archives Portal Europe

The most important archival standard used by the Archives Portal Europe is Encoded Archival Description (EAD), an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids, maintained by the Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Standards (TS-EAS) of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), in partnership with the Library of Congress.

Describing holdings and collections

The development of the EAD standard began with a project initiated by the University of California, Berkeley Library in 1993, led by Daniel Pitti. The requirements for the encoding standard then included – and still include today – the following criteria:

• ability to present extensive and interrelated descriptive information found in archival finding aids,
• ability to preserve the hierarchical relationships existing between levels of description,
• ability to represent descriptive information that is inherited by one hierarchical level from another,
• ability to move within a hierarchical informational structure,
• support for element-specific indexing and retrieval.

EAD is by now used world wide for data exchange between archival institutions and for Internet presentations of archival descriptive information. It is especially applied for trans-institutional and trans-national projects like the Archives Portal Europe.

The first version of EAD, v1.0, was published in 1998, the second version, EAD2002, was released in December 2002 and the work on the revision of EAD2002, which led to the current version, EAD3, was started in 2010 and finished in August 2015. Currently the TS-EAS of the SAA is working on a first update of EAD3, v1.1, which will probably be released in the summer of 2018.

• Go to the official EAD homepage on the website of the Library of Congress
• Go to the official EAD2002 Tag Library to learn more about EAD2002 elements and attributes available.
• Go to the official EAD3 Tag Library to learn more about EAD3 elements and attributes available
• Go to the SAA website for Frequently Asked Questions about EAD in general and EAD3 in particular
• See the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G) as correspondent describing standard as maintained by the International Council on Archives (ICA).

The use of EAD as backbone within the three-layers-concept of the Archives Portal Europe

Within the Archives Portal Europe EAD is used with a concept of three interrelated and interconnected layers of description. Each of them consists of individual documents structured internally with the levels of EAD.

The first layer, the Archival Landscape, consists of one EAD document and has the function of a sort of umbrella for the whole providing users of the Archives Portal Europe with a starting point for navigational research by:

• naming all participating archival institutions in a structured way (f.i. sorted by country) with links to their more detailed descriptive information on the next lower level and
  • granting access to detailed information on the institutions themselves like contact details or opening hours given in EAG files linked to the Archival Landscape.

The second layer, the Holdings Guides, consists of a set of EAD documents containing each a structured list of fonds or record groups of every archival institution. It aims at:

• giving an overview over the fonds and collections of the single archival institutions, intended to include links to more detailed information on records creators in EAC-CPF files,
• providing short information on fonds and collections incl. f.i. conditions concerning their access and use and
• linking to their detailed description on the next lower level.

The third layer, the Finding Aids, consists of EAD documents containing detailed description for the single fonds or record groups structured according to series and arrangement groups. Finding Aids will:

• provide detailed information on the archival material from collection level down to units' level indicating the reference numbers necessary for ordering or communication with the archival repositories and
• grant access to digitisations of the archival material, if applicable