Encoded Archival Description is an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids, maintained by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Society of American Archivists.
EAD originated in 1993, at the University of California, Berkeley. The project's goal was to create a standard for describing collections held by archives and special collections, similar to the MARC standards for describing regular books. Such a standard enables museums,...
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Encoded Archival Description is an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids, maintained by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Society of American Archivists.
EAD originated in 1993, at the University of California, Berkeley. The project's goal was to create a standard for describing collections held by archives and special collections, similar to the MARC standards for describing regular books. Such a standard enables museums, libraries, and manuscript repositories to list and describe their holdings in a manner that would be machine-readable and therefore easy to search, maintain, exchange. Since its inception many special collections and archives have adopted it.
In addition to the development and maintenance work done by the Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) has developed and published a set of "Best Practices" implementation guidelines for EAD, which lays out mandatory, recommended, and optional...
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