I also think it's better to store EAD in a separate system rather than in
the Solr index, that way you can use blacklight to serialize it or store a
reference to a separate delivery system.  Bess's and Matt's approach to
storing the whole collection (EAD file) as a solr document in addition to
making each item accessible in blacklight is a good one.  Hopefully this
will encourage institutions to use EAD in its fullest and encode items at a
very detailed level.  I'd say at least 95% of finding aids I have seen have
little more than title, date, and container for items, if items are
enumerated at all.  The thing about most EAD delivery systems is that they
assume you wish to use EAD in its traditional form, as an electronic finding
aid that you wish to render in full on the screen.  Most systems don't
accommodate an emphasis on item level encoding, display, and findability.

Ethan

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:53 PM, Mark A. Matienzo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Bess Sadler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > On Aug 6, 2010, at 9:10 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> >
> >>> We indexed each EAD guide into separate lucene documents for each EAD
> section, then collapsed them under the main EAD title in the search results,
> >>
> >> Curious how you impelemented that: Did you use the Solr "field
> collapsing" patch that's not yet part of a standard distro?
> >
> > Yes, exactly.
>
> Bess - would you be willing to share code or brief notes about how to
> set this up?
>
> > Yeah, that's a good point. We were trying to self-contain the whole thing
> for ease of deployment, but I'm not sure that's a good approach. It's better
> if your EAD is in a real repository and Blacklight just presents it.
>
> +1. Potential options could include using an XML database like eXist,
> or using our approach at Yale (where EAD finding aids are stored as
> datastreams in Fedora objects). I've been eager to look at rethinking
> our approach, especially given the availability of the Hydra codebase.
>
> Mark A. Matienzo
> Digital Archivist, Manuscripts and Archives
> Yale University Library
>