The archival community's new descriptive standard, "Encoded Archival Context" for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF), supports the sharing of descriptions of records creators and is a significant addition to the suite of standards for archival description. EAC-CPF is a data structure standard similar to its older sibling EAD…

In the mid 1990s, Encoded Archival Description (EAD) appeared as a revolutionary technology for publishing archival finding aids on the Web. The author explores whether or not, given the advent of Web 2.0, the archival community should abandon EAD and look for something to replace it. (Contains 18 notes.)

Born-digital material such as archived Web sites provides unique challenges in ensuring access and preservation. This article examines some of the technical challenges involved in harvesting and managing Web archives as well as metadata strategies to provide descriptive, technical, and preservation related information about archived Web sites,…

User studies have been conducted for many years in the information and library science fields. In the archival world, this phenomenon has not been as common and less emphasis has been placed on collecting and studying the user's perspective in general. However, there are studies showing the "use" of these types of studies, particularly in the…

The article reports the results of a usability study of an EAD interface. Findings indicate that subjects had trouble understanding archival terminology and how best to search for information in finding aids. Furthermore, they were not familiar with the structure or contents of finding aids. In addition to building interfaces that minimize…

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) can be seen to have reached maturity as the global data structure standard for the electronic representation of archival finding aids. One factor responsible for this success, flexibility, is now being questioned as it has led to a great deal of divergent practice. This article discusses the attempt to tighten…

The study investigated implications of variations in EAD [Encoded Archival Description]-encoded finding aids on the Web. A content analysis methodology was used to examine five different aspects of EAD finding aids: (1) data elements; (2) labeling terminology; (3) navigation; (4) browsing; (5) searching. Seventeen EAD finding aid web sites…

This article highlights the California Cultures Project as a case study examining the architecture and framework required to support the deployment of digital objects as virtual collections at the California Digital Library. Chronologically arranged, it describes the Online Archive of California (OAC) Working Group's functional requirements for…