Tag Archives: best practices guidelines

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

1st draft available for review: TARO schema-compliant encoding guidelines

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On behalf of Rebecca Romanchuk and Carla Alvarez, TARO Standards Committee co-chairs, please read the following asking for your feedback on the new schema-compliant encoding guidelines, which will be used by all TARO repositories after each repository is converted to schema compliance later this year.
Please know that doing your conversion, you will have one–on–one contact with a TARO volunteer to help you get started submitting finding aids in schema format using these guidelines, but we welcome your feedback on the guidelines now. ___________________________________________________________________________The TARO Standards subcommittee is pleased to announce that we have completed our first draft of the EAD 2002 Schema Best Practice Guidelines for TARO!

Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO), Texas’ EAD finding aid consortial site – https://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/, is in the midst of an NEH planning grant to develop improved systems and updated standards for TARO as it achieves sustainability to serve the archival research community into the future. Part of this work is to create new encoding guidelines for TARO repositories that conform to the EAD 2002 Schema encoding standard, which TARO will complete conversion to in 2016. These best practice guidelines (BPG) are available as a PDF at http://bit.ly/1Wk6p6W. The BPG appendices are a TARO-friendly sample Schema-compliant template for EAD encoding for your use, and an EAD finding aid ex ample. These appendices are also available at the same link as XML files.

We welcome feedback addressing every aspect of our BPG.

Go to http://goo.gl/forms/gaJXiCVtp4 to complete a brief survey to give us your ideas for how the BPG can better address your needs for EAD encoding. The survey is configured to adapt its questions depending on whether your repository is a TARO member, or if you are in Texas and have not yet joined TARO, or if you are outside of Texas and want to give us your general feedback.

Please complete the survey by Friday, June 3, 2016.

If you encode for TARO, we need to hear from you. The BPG, which will be a key tool for TARO participants, offers detailed guidance on creating EAD XML files. Even participants who export XML from software such as ArchivesSpace (and don’t see the raw XML) will need to follow TARO protocols as described in the BPG, such as formatting the <eadid>. You will need to follow the BPG in order to submit your Schema-compliant files to TARO, which each repository will be required to do by the end of 2016.

The co-chairs of the TARO Standards subcommittee extend sincere thanks to its members for their superb contributions to the BPG. Invaluable support has been provided during our drafting process by TARO Steering Committee co-chairs Amanda Focke and Amy Bowman, UT Libraries TARO technical support staff Minnie Rangel, and our NEH planning grant project manager Leigh Grinstead and grant consultant Jodi Allison-Bunnell. We are also grateful to the EAD consortial community at large for the encoding documentation they make available online, in particular Online Archive of California and Archives West, which are models that have guided us.

Cordially,

Carla Alvarez, MA, CA (co-chair – TARO Standards subcommittee)
Rare Books and Manuscripts
Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection
University of Texas at Austin

Rebecca Romanchuk, MLIS, CA (co-chair – TARO Standards subcommittee)
Team Lead, Archives / Archivist II
Archives and Information Services
Texas State Library and Archives Commission

TARO Standards subcommittee members:  
Maristella Feustle (UNT-Music Library),
Cynthia Franco (SMU-DeGolyer Library),
Molly Hults (Austin Public Library-Austin History Center),
Benna Vaughan (Baylor University-Texas Collection),
Jeffrey Warner (Rice University-Woodson Research Center).

Reminder: comments due by April15

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Friendly reminder! Comments due on this document with TARO’s mission, vision, and more due by April 15. Thanks!

The TARO Steering Committee has worked with Leigh Grinstead, TARO’s NEH Planning Grant Manager, to create the following  collection development document articulating TARO’s purpose, background, mission, vision, audience, project scope, participation criteria and more.

This document is an important beginning step toward formalizing TARO. Additional documents will also be developed, such as TARO Best Practices Guidelines, and we continue to explore organizational issues and new platform options.

We invite you to read this collection development document and send any comments by April 15
to the TARO listserv (taro-lib@utlists.utexas.edu)
or directly to the co-chairs and project manager:

Co-chairs:
Amanda Focke, Rice University, afocke@rice.edu &
Amy Bowman, Briscoe Center for American Studies, a.bowman@austin.utexas.edu

Project Manager for NEH Planning Grant:
Leigh Grinstead, Lyrasis, leigh.grinstead@lyrasis.org
Thanks,
Amanda

Want to see more details such as meeting minutes and more? Go to the TARO wiki.