Hi all,
I have been working to improve EADitor, the XForms-based solution for
creating, editing, and managing EAD finding aids. Some improvements and
bugfixes have been implemented, including better controlled vocabulary
management and integrating into the EAD-editing interface.
FEATURES
* Create complex XML in a web form with an intuitive interface
* Subject terms in controlaccess are linked to LCSH with auto-suggest. LCSH
terms can be updated from the id.loc.gov Atom feed on a button click.
* Subjects, persnames, corpnames, genreforms, famnames, and geognames can be
scraped from EAD guides already in the collection and populate an index used
for auto-suggesting those terms in controlaccess also
* Set templates of the default EAD Header/Frontmatter/Archdesc instance and
Component instance
* Create new agencycodes and institution names or scrape them from existing
documents in the collection (the form's controlled drop down menu is derived
from this list)
* Publish or unpublish documents to/from a Solr index that will used to
build an eventual public interface for faceting browsing, sorting, and
advanced searching features
* Upload EAD guides from the "wild" and process them to make markup more
consistent (this feature still has some bugs).
WHAT'S NEXT
* Create new localized authority terms and edit current ones
* Insert unique identifiers into the @id of controlled access terms so
guides always stay up to date on term changes.
* Customize HTML widget for EAD to generate mixed content at the paragraph
level
* Public interface
* Fedora repository interaction examples
* More documentation!
BACKGROUND
(boilerplate from project website)
EADitor is an XForms framework for the creation and editing of Encoded
Archival Description <http://www.loc.gov/ead/> (EAD) finding aids using
Orbeon <http://www.orbeon.com/>, an enterprise-level XForms Java
application, which runs in Apache Tomcat.
Many institutions have faced challenges in the efficient creation of
electronic finding aids since the introduction of EAD in 1998. For finding
aids to be useful to patrons of archives, robust metadata is required to
adequately describe the conceptual organization of a manuscript collection.
Subject specialists contribute their knowledge to provide context to the
collection, which allows it to be searched more relevantly. EAD is a complex
descriptive schema, and not all archivists or subject specialists can (or
should) be required to be competent in XML encoding. The use of
XForms<http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/>,
a W3C standard, to allow the creation of robust metadata through a
next-generation web form removes barriers from subject specialists in the
creation of EAD guides and reduces the potential for human errors in
semantic usage or invalid XML.
Resources: http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/
There is an instance of EADitor running on a test server. If you are
interested in accessing the sandbox, email me off list and I'll provide a
link.
Comments and criticism welcome,
Ethan Gruber
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