Rethinking EAD: Balancing flexibility and interoperability

Abstract

The practice of encoding archival finding aids in Encoded Archival Description (EAD), an SGML/XML based data structure standard developed to facilitate electronic distribution of detailed information about archival collections, has been rapidly and enthusiastically adopted by many in the archival community. Because there is no single widely adopted archival descriptive practice, the EAD Document Type Definition (DTD) was intentionally designed to allow for a great deal of flexibility in descriptive practice. This led to a permissive data model, both to accommodate emerging descriptive practices such as RAD and ISAD(G), as well as legacy finding aids. Although this flexibility may have contributed to wide adoption of EAD, in the long run it hampers the very data exchange for which EAD was created. Tensions inherent in the DTD and the resulting widely varying implementation practices confound the development of rules‐based processing of data for cross‐repository exchange and resource discovery. This paper argues that a more prescriptive descriptive standard, or a constrained group of standards that can be mapped to one another, will greatly enhance the potential for machine processing of finding aids across repositories. It will also aid in the development of tools that would facilitate creation and distribution of finding aids.