Present: Nicole Bouche, Joan Swanekamp, Dajin Sun, David Persall, Stephen Yearl, Karen Reardon, Matthew Beacom, Marsha Garman, Ed Kairiss
Absent: Daphne Rentfro, Jennifer Weintraub (on leave), Rebekah Irwin (on leave)
Stephen Yearl presented an "under the hood" view of the EAD creation system used in MSSA at Yale.
Since fall 2002, the production tool for new EAD finding aids has been Open Office., an alternative to MS Office. Open Office is an open source program that is compatible with MS Office.
Open office's native format is a zip file with XML documents inside. The archivist used a predefined template to make the finding aid in a familiar word processor environment. Scripts written in perl and XSLT create the fining aid per the EAD DTD from the completed template. PDF versions for print and HTML for online access are produced. An additional instance of the EAD files goes into MSSA's XML database.
The template has built in information (instructions) about making a finding aid. Fields in the finding aid are mapped to MARC so one can extract from a MARC record to populate fields in the finding aid. Inventory sections of the finding aid, however, have no MARC or other metadata analog.
Another set of tools is used for working with a vendor to convert printed finding aids. Given how various practices have been over time with printed finding aids, conversion of these finding aids to online format requires a set of tools that are more flexible than the template. The basic tool is NoteTabPro, which is readily extensible and includes a useful macro language. So vendors use a set of macros in NoteTabPro to convert printed finding aids into EAD form.
To validate the finding aids, the text is checked against a sub-set of the EAD DTD expressed in Relax NG (RNG, Regular Expression Language for XML, New Generation).
Other tools allow conversion between ASCII, UTF-8 and windows character sets.
Beacom reported on work in progress. Group is still working on the format, speakers, and dates.
Beacom called for volunteers to work on developing a core metadata standard for Yale. He and Karen Reardon volunteered. Others are welcome.
Beacom asked if others thought developing a network of metadata users and creators at Yale for sharing information and possible collaboration would be of value. No time for discussion, so postponed to next meeting.
Wednesday Feb. 23 at 11 to 12 in SML room 409.