Reengineering Finding Aids Revisited

Abstract

The technical issues surrounding the implementation of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) seem to overshadow the importance of archival descriptive standards in developing access tools for our historical collections. Influenced by Dennis Meissner's 1997 American Archivist article on EAD and reengineering finding aids at the Minnesota Historical Society, the author posed eight hypotheses and conducted an online survey of repositories creating EAD finding aids to test his theories. The results indicate that archivists are clearly lacking in applying content standardization in their descriptive work. The author urges the profession to become more concerned with developing data content standards and best practice guidelines to ensure proper data exchange. As he states, “Patience on this end … is more important to the field than increasing the number of available finding aids available online to users. Putting EAD finding aids online with malformed content only serves to pollute the archival data pool. Learning data content standards early in the process not only improves the richness of our archival representations, but will also help create a more uniform user experience across repositories down the road.”