Encoded Archival Description Finding Aid Creation Tool Workshop (updated July 22)
Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is an encoding standard used to create finding aids for archival collections. OhioLink has a tool to facilitate the creation of EAD finding aids. These finding aids are submitted to the OhioLink Finding Aid Repository.
Deb has been working with OhioLink's tool for over a year, so when this workshop was offered at Kelvin Smith Library while Deb was at the AALL Annual Meeting, I offered to go and see if they discussed anything she didn’t already know.
Before the workshop, participants were asked to view the content guidelines at http://silver.ohiolink.edu/dms/ead/contentguide/index.html.
At the workshop, Cara Gilgenbach, chair of the OhioLink EAD Taskforce, demonstrated how to set up user accounts, create finding aids, and submit the finding aids to OhioLink.
The morning session mainly dealt with the "big picture," the part of the finding aid that pertained to a specific collection as a whole. Cara discussed which fields are required for a valid finding aid, and she explained the optional fields.
The afternoon session went into the component level of the finding aid. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, this refers to the individual items that are part of the collection, and it can be as detailed as telling the box and file folder number of each specific document. For the workshop, Ms. Gilgenbach created a finding aid for the Guide to the Ima R. Kivist papers (an imaginary collection), and this finding aid included all the optional fields, so users could see what the system could do.
When I did some component-level data input into Deb's finding aid, I found the system had some interesting idiosyncrasies.
- I found that the buttons to rearrange fields sometimes don't work as they should. After creating twelve "series" entries, I viewed a summary and they were not in order. When I attempted to rearrange them, the "move field" buttons moved them to random places in the list. I ended up creating a field, viewing a summary, saving, creating another field, viewing a summary, and saving. The trainers hadn't seen this before, so they made a note of it and took it back to the tech team. The tech team was unable to replicate the problem, and when I tried to get it to replicate, it didn't happen again.
- When I tried to enter a very long field name that contained quotation marks, it truncated the field name before the quotes. The trainers explained that the system had intermittent problems with some punctuation, and they were working on it.
- When I previewed the finding aid, the formatting looked horrible. The trainers explained that it was just a rough preview, and once the finding aid was submitted, the system would make the formatting consistent with the other finding aids in the repository.
- Finally, when I attempted to validate Deb's finding aid, it gave me an error message that did not tell what (or even where) the error was. Ms. Gilgenbach made a note of this and told me she'd get back to me. A few days later, a member of the tech team identified the problem as a list with a header, but no items, in it. When I deleted the list, the finding aid validated.
Overall, I think this was a helpful, well-run workshop, and when the glitches are worked out of this tool, it will be a straightforward, user-friendly piece of software.
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