The Metrica Regni Project: The Polish Experience of EAD

Abstract

SUMMARY The fonds of Crown Chancery Public Register (Metrica Regni) was chosen for the pilot project to introduce Encoded Archival Description (EAD) because of its historical value, typical archival structure and existing finding aids. The rights and privileges granted by Polish kings were recorded in the Register. The oldest books in the series of registrations (Libri Inscriptionum) began in the middle of the fifteenth century. This paper discusses how the Polish EAD project was completed from the fall of 2003 by the staff of the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw. It started with the theoretical background and ended with practical work with a Polish HTML editor–“Pajączek” (Little Spider). The data were prepared and exported from a Microsoft Access database and a Microsoft Word editor into an XML file. After validations and corrections, the stylesheet from the “EAD Cookbook” was adopted as a delivery method. On 29 July 2004 the first version of the inventory of Crown Chancery Public Register in EAD was published on the Web site of the Central Archives of Historical Records.