What are EAD and DACS?

Encoded Archival Description is a standard to create machine-readable archival finding aids in XML format.

Describing Archives: A Content Standard is a format-neutral descriptive standard to guide archival description. It has been the official content standard of the U.S. archivist community since it was adopted by the Society of American Archivists in 2005. And it lives on GitHub!

What’s on this site?

This is a place for me to store my completed and in-progress finding aids, in both machine-readable (EAD/XML) and human readable (HTML) formats.

Completed Finding Aids

• Bates College Clothing Archive (BCCA): Rowe Family Collection

  Compliant with DACS multilevel optimum guidelines.

  The EAD file has been validated against the EAD3 XML schema published by the Society of American Archivists Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards using the XML::xmlSchemaValidate() function in R. This schema is available on GitHub.

  Available as:

  • EAD
  • Human-readable HTML

In-Progress Finding Aids

• Bates College Clothing Archive (BCCA) full finding aid
  • Draft EAD

Non-DACS XML practice

• Example Dublin Core XML encoding for one BCCA object