 |
 |
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 08:25:05PM -0400, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: > Create EAD files to describe the collections in your archives because EAD is the MARC of the archives world. There are no two ways about it. --ELM That might not be the best way of putting it given the full extent of the original question (see below). EAD vs HTML? No question (EAD). Can MARC be used to describe archival collections? Fact is, it is. This leads to a followup question: What is the current uptake of EAD in the archival world? I did some looking and couldn't find percentages stated. What I'm asking is, of those archival collections described using electronic finding aids, what percentage are EAD? What percentage are MARC? What percentage are other? (I don't care to distinguish HTML from PDF, for example.) Is anyone doing anything creative with, say, linked data? (What I really mean is RDF, plain and simple.) I realize this is going off topic, but the original topic is pretty much dead in the water if we confine it to EAD vs HTML. But if we add the bit about "Or are both [EAD and MARC] going the way of the dinosaurs?", then the answer is no, not (quite) yet, but I do recall at the very first DLF meeting, when EAD was presented, mutterings from about half the audience that this should be a database application. Since then we've seen more than one viable XML database, or software than can handle XML nicely (e.g., XTF), so while that objection disappears, nevertheless I think that the observation underlying those mutterings still stands: is there a better way to this (at least, conceptually), and, is anyone working on such a way? Today EAD is clearly the answer, but if EAD was questionable even then, I'm wondering what a viable successor might be tomorrow (which doesn't, of course, affect what implementation decisions we make today). -- Charles Blair Director, Digital Library Development Center, University of Chicago Library 1 773 702 8459 | [log in to unmask] | http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/~chas/