Building Lite-Weight EAD Repositories

摘要

University Archives and museums traditional haven't been viewed as a bastion for innovative technology development, but for a number of years now, it has been university archives and museums that have made the most significant moves towards adopting and utilizing XML-based metadata schemas for bibliographic description. Unlike the general library profession, which has been able to rely on MARC throughout the years as its primary vehicle for bibliographic description, museums and archives have traditionally had no formal metadata structure to create portable metadata records. It is likely that for this reason that museums and archives were quick to embrace EAD (Encoded Archival Description) as the defacto method for creating portable finding aids. However, while EAD has provided a vehicle for portability, institutions have found that actually using these finding aids within a database or for display can be quite daunting. Often times, individual institutions creating finding aids have no idea how to make use of them within their institution's current infrastructure - often relying on larger organizations like the California Digital Library or the Northwest Digital Archive (NWDA) to provide a vehicle for distributing their materials. And while the consortia method of distribution offers a number of benefits, it does come at a cost of individual institutional identity.