About
The Archival Collections site presents selected archival and manuscript collections finding aids that have been encoded in the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) XML format. Information about these collections, including additional finding aids in PDF or other non-EAD formats: University Archives, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Galter Health Sciences Library, the Music Library, and the Melville J. Herskovits Library of Africana.
Encoded Archival Description
The EAD standard was jointly developed and released by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Library of Congress in 1998. The standard was designed to give archivists and manuscript curators the electronic means to describe collections according to the arrangement of objects, and to provide contextual information (scope notes, biographical notes, etc.) to explain the collection and the collector. Since its release, however, EAD has been used to arrange and describe a wide variety of collections and materials, and has been adopted by most major U.S. research libraries and
archives.
The EAD standard has been published as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) tagset. XML tags convey information about the structure and meaning of documents. For example, a <bioghist> XML tag will surround the paragraphs in an EAD finding aid that
contain biographical information. The same biographical information destined for publication as a web page (HTML document), Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat PDF document will only specify where paragraph breaks occur. Such stylistic information ensures proper display but does not allow the user to locate and analyze a document according to its semantic content.
About Northwestern's EAD Implementation Initiative
For more information about searching and using these finding aids, visit the Help page.
Technical architecture
Northwestern's Archival Collections are delivered via the Fedora digital library architecture and the Lucene search engine.
