Northwestern University Library (NUL) hosted an event organized by the Chicago Area Archivists this fall. Two information professionals working in the archives and library presented on three topics: XML, EAD, and ArchivesSpace. I decided to attend the event given my increasing involvement in the sphere of metadata at work, and my interest in how other organizations adopt standards and tools.
First, the metadata specialist gave some basic foundational information about XML - extensible markup language - a plain text markup language. She provided a brief history of the language, context including related schemas (HTML, SGML), and examples of ways the data can be transformed via cascading style sheets (CSS) or extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT) (Miller, 2019). Next, she provided some basic structure and syntax rules, including “root” and “child” elements and limitations on characters (Miller, 2019). NUL uses XML given how flexible and powerful it can be as a way of organizing and transforming data. XML works well with a variety of structure schemas and controlled vocabularies that the institution relies on in order to publish the data on various platforms, and a well-formed XML document can be highly extensible. Oxygen is one software tool metadata librarians use at NUL to review and edit XML metadata, and the presenter provided a number of screengrab examples of this interface to show what XML looks like during her talk.
The metadata specialist then dove into EAD or encoded archival description. Once again, she provided some background information about the standard, especially as it related to the shift in making traditional paper finding aids machine-readable in order to make them more accessible (Miller, 2019). EAD is maintained by the Library of Congress and Society of American Archivists, and it is rooted in published standards for syntax and elements (Miller, 2019). The presenter discussed the core components of EAD next: the header, which describes the finding aid itself; front matter, which describes the finding aid publication information; and the archival description, which describes the collection (Miller, 2019).
The archival description contains the core content of the finding aid, so the presenter spent the most time here. She outlined the type of information one might find here, including: the title, abstract, physical description, subject headings, biographical or historical note, collection description, scope and arrangement notes, provenance, custodial history, and access and use restrictions (Miller, 2019). The collection contents also fall under this section, and this allows for a hierarchical description of the collection - often mirroring the physical organization, broken down by box and folder level-information (Miller, 2019). Helpfully, EAD provides some structure for this way of outlining the content of a collection, allowing up to 12 layers of such “component elements” - numbered c01, c02, etc (Miller, 2019). EAD allows for an archivist or librarian to choose the degree of detail and levels of hierarchy for a finding aid, as it is not prescriptive. Finally, she discussed the use of attributes within EAD to make the components of a finding aid machine-readable. She touched on the ways in which attributes can be described through tags to provide greater specificity about the element - “label” is a label meant to be used in the display of the data, “normal” to indicate the established form of a heading like an ISO-formatted date, and “source” to indicate the source of a controlled vocabulary term (Miller, 2019).
One of the library’s archivists then provided a walk-through of NUL’s instance of ArchivesSpace, which is where the organization hosts its EAD finding aids. He discussed their workflow in ingesting documents into the system, the ways in which data can be further edited once it is in ArchivesSpace, and how it displays for the general public. The library has only been using it for a few years, but it sounds as though it is working well to make accessible finding aids for their archival collections. We had the opportunity to sit down in one of the library’s computer labs to try the system out in its test environment. This gave me a much better feel for the interface, and all of the ways in which you can manipulate and edit data.
The day also included a tour of some of the library’s on-campus but off-site storage for archival collections. The archivist told us about the changes the library is undergoing in terms of staffing organization, and how this is impacting how special collections are conceived. Part of this will include some reorganization of the physical storage of collections, and it sounds like a daunting project they have ahead of them. I am always thankful for the chance to peer behind the scenes and see what these spaces look like at other organizations, especially since I never had the chance to visit this space when I worked at NUL years ago.
This was a wonderful opportunity to see how these elements that are often discussed in the abstract - XML, EAD - actually work in practice, and how they interface with tools like Oxygen and ArchivesSpace. I now feel like I have a much better grasp of these standards, especially in seeing examples of real finding aids.
References:
Miller, K. (2019). Introduction to EAD and XML. [Workshop handout].