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.

Development of the EAD standard began with a project initiated by the University of California, Berkeley Library in 1993. 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.