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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