EAD 2002 encoding with an eye to the future

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Greetings from the TARO Standards subcommittee! A self-assigned task that we took on for our work in 2019 was to develop a list of tips to offer to TARO member repositories for how to encode in EAD 2002 with an eye toward making future migration to EAD3 easier. While migrating to EAD3 will be in our future, TARO doesn’t have current plans to do so. No other EAD consortium in the U.S. has migrated to EAD3 yet, and Standards recommends that TARO wait until at least one consortium does and has shared its documentation about the migration with the archival community.

One of the tasks that the Website & Technology subcommittee will be undertaking during TARO’s NEH implementation grant project (running through April 2022) is pilot testing of EAD3 migration for TARO files and submitting a report on its findings. This appears to be the best opportunity for recognizing in what ways EAD 2002 encoding in TARO files does or does not successfully migrate to EAD3. Afterward, Standards will compile encoding tips and share them with the TARO community. We plan to share those at the end of the grant project, in late spring 2022.

An EAD3 Study Group formed by SAA’s Encoded Archival Standards Section released a report in 2017 (Implementing EAD3: Conversion and Migration) outlining how well EAD 2002 elements and attributes migrate to EAD3. Both Standards and Website & Technology have studied this report and will adapt those findings and recommendations to TARO’s needs when the time comes for us to migrate to EAD3.

How might a TARO repository improve its encoding now, before these tips become available? Be sure to follow TARO’s EAD Best Practice Guidelines and refer to the EAD Tag Library Version 2002 to use elements and attributes as they’re intended. Another very helpful resource is EADiva.com, which provides a list of elements continuing from EAD 2002 into EAD3 and a list of those that are not (deprecated elements), along with a list of brand new elements in EAD3. An explanation of how date encoding occurs in EAD3 is also included in this very approachable website.

Questions? Please contact the Standards co-chairs directly at our email addresses below.

— Molly Hults (molly.hults@austintexas.gov) and Rebecca Romanchuk (rromnchk@tsl.texas.gov), Standards co-chairs

Voting now open!

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Dear TARO representatives,

We would like your participation in selecting the next Vice Chair and 2 At-Large members of the TARO Steering Committee! Once you’ve reviewed the slate of candidates please cast your ballot here. Please note that because a current At-Large Member of the Steering Committee is the sole candidate for Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, there may be a third At-Large Vacancy. In the event that the third vacancy opens up, successful At-Large candidates will be informed before the election results are announced. Voting closes in one week, at 5pm CST on Tuesday, November 19. The current list of Steering Committee members may be found here.

Thanks so much for nominating candidates for Chair-Elect and the At-Large members!

TARO Nominating Committee: Samantha Dodd, Paul Fisher, Robert Weaver

NAFAN Action Plan Released

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We are pleased to share the following action plan, which represents the culmination of “Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network” (NAFAN) — a one-year (October 2018-September 2019) planning initiative convened by the California Digital Library (CDL), with the participation of representatives from multiple regional finding aid aggregations including Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO), and input from expert advisors:

https://bit.ly/action-plan-nafan

Many regional finding aid aggregators across the country struggle to find sufficient resources to update their platforms and engage with some of the most promising advances in the field. With crucial funding support from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) and administered in California by the State Librarian, the NAFAN initiative proposed to explore the creation of a national archival finding aid network that could fundamentally transform the archival description landscape while continuing to serve the needs of aggregators and archival repositories. The initiative provided participants opportunities to discuss and test the original premise: by pooling resources and establishing co-development partnerships, we believe we can address our individual challenges collectively, thereby extending the capabilities, breadth, and depth of existing aggregations.

The action plan is a key deliverable of the planning initiative, building on the release of the Finding Aid Aggregation at a Crossroads report and incorporating outcomes from a planning symposium held in June of this year.

At the heart of the action plan are recommendations for and principles to guide next steps to implement a sustainable national-level finding aid network, based on a phased, incremental approach that: moves this effort from a research and demonstration project to a program; is informed by a research agenda; and, from the outset, includes work to establish business and governance models that fit the infrastructure and service model and are grounded in the community’s organizational and financial capacity.

Over the coming months, the CDL will convene follow-up discussions with the planning initiative participants to formalize and initiate work identified in the action plan.

For more information about the NAFAN planning initiative and outcomes, please see the project wiki.