I am grateful to you all for the opportunity to serve your chair over the past year. When we last met in August, no one could have predicted how the world, our lives, and our work would change. Working through these changes could not have happened in better company. I'd like to thank the steering committee, Tara Zachary Laver and Chris Prom; outgoing/incoming newsletter editors, Ann Hodges and John Rees; outgoing/incoming webmasters, Diana Smith and Diane Ducharme; and our vice-chair, Brad Westbrook, into whose capable hands I will leave this office. The hard work of all these individuals has benefited the section in ways I cannot adequately describe. Let's have a great meeting in Birmingham!
III. Section Reports
Descriptive Notes - John Rees
Section Web Site - Diane Ducharme
Finding Aids Fair - Brad Westbrook
IV. Ongoing Business
Section-sponsored sessions on the 2002 program - Mary Lacy
Ideas for 2002 program sessions - Brad Westbrook
Amendment of bylaws (adding Coker Awards subcommittee service to duties
of Chair)
V. New Business
VI. Election of Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect (results announced at the end of the program)
VII. Program
Jean Dryden, Editor and Project Manager of the Canadian/U.S. Taskforce on Archival Description (CUSTARD) project update, will give a presentation on the work of the CUSTARD project to date, including its recently published "Statement of Principles", available at: http://www.archivists.org/news/custardproject.asp
Section Endorsed Sessions
03. Teaching EAD: Multiple Perspectives
Thursday, August 22, 2002
1:30 PM-3:00 PM
In this session participants will compare training rationales, instructional design, learning objectives, and evaluation practices in various settings to determine the effectiveness of the instructional models currently used to teach this new descriptive encoding practice.
37. Introduction to METS: The Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard
Friday, August 23, 2002
3:00 PM-4:30 PM
METS is a generalized metadata framework, developed to encode the descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata for objects within a digital library. This panel will give an overview of the schema, and will provide insight into current usage, tools for creation and display, the relationship between EAD and METS, the importance of structural and administrative metadata, and how METS relates to other schemas. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.
Also Of Interest Ä
11. Archives Unplugged: Arrangement and Description
Thursday, August 22, 2002
3:30 PM-5:00 PM
This session will boil down the essential principles and practices that underpin archival arrangement and description. Six practical steps will be provided to guide attendees through the mysteries of developing basic, effective archival descriptions. Attendees will be provided with a range of examples and resources to support their own descriptive efforts.
Special Event
Metadata Matters: RLG Update on Current Metadata Initiatives
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
1:00 PM-5:00 PM
Participants will learn about and discuss the implications of a number of new
metadata initiatives that have special relevance to the archival community.
More information can be found at: http://www.rlg.org/primary/metadata_update02.html
. Please RSVP to Fran Devlin at fed@notes.rlg.org.
Finding Aids Fair
Attendees to the SAA conference in Birmingham this August can stop by the Description Section's Finding Aids Fair to learn more about evolving practices for describing archival digital surrogates. Digital surrogates are a great benefit to researchers far and near. But describing digital surrogates is highly vexing because they are relatively new entities, because the rationale for description is not always clear, because there is little certainty how these items should interact with other materials, and because, perhaps most of all, their granularity goes against the time honored collection level practices of the archivist and manuscript curator.
This year's Finding Aid Fair will reveal some of the ways repositories are describing their digital surrogates and some of the reasons and principles behind their descriptive practices. Repositories wishing to participate in the fair are encouraged to submit examples of the following kinds of resources that may be used in a local setting for describing archival digital surrogates:
The Finding Aid Fair will be located in an exhibits booth on Thursday and Friday of this year's SAA conference. To contribute to the 2002 Finding Aids Fair, please contact Bradley Westbrook by e-mail (bdwestbrook@ucsd.edu) or by phone at (858) 822-0612. Best practice guidelines for digital objects and examples of digital object metadata may also be submitted by surface mail to Bradley Westbrook, UCAI Office, Geisel Library, UC-San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093. A bibliography of submissions, with URLs for online resources, will be made available on the Web after SAA.
Section Officer Candidate Statements
Vice-Chair/Chair Elect
Stephen D. Miller
Director, Digital Library of Georgia
Stephen is currently the Director of the Digital Library of Georgia, a statewide digital library project focused on the historical and cultural materials of Georgia that is based at the University of Georgia Libraries. Prior to coming to Georgia, he worked at Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library on a number of projects involving digitization of primary source materials and the creation of Duke's EAD finding aid database during the development of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard. He holds a Masters of Science in Library Science from the University of Kentucky School of Library and Information Science and has been a SAA member since 1995.
Christopher J. Prom
Assistant University Archivist, University of Illinois
Chris' professional duties include assisting the University Archivist appraise records and manuscripts, overseeing the transfer of materials to the Archives, supervising processing activities, and managing digital projects, including the preparation of EAD finding aids. He is also a co-Principal Investigator on the University of Illinois Metadata Harvesting (Open Archives Initiative) Project. Chris serves on SAA's Technical Subcommittee on Descriptive Standards as well. His publications include "Extending the Capabilities of the EAD Cookbook" (OCLC Systems and Services 17:2) and "Using the Open Archives Initiatives Protocols with EAD" (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2002 Proceedings). Forthcoming are two articles related to description and a biography of Charles Gosnell (Dictionary of American Library Biography, 2nd Supplement. Chris holds a M.A. in history from Marquette University and is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Illinois.
Voting will take place during the Section meeting.
News Notes
New Web Sites
Check out these new sites. Your colleagues worked hard over the past year to create a variety of research and outreach tools, such as finding aids and interactive web sites.
Grants and Projects
Northwest Digital Archives Funded by NEH
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $350,000 for establishment of the Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA). The 2-year project (to begin on July 1, 2002) will provide enhanced access to archival and manuscript materials in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington through a union database of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids. The database will provide consistent and integrated access to 2,200 finding aids for regionally significant primary source materials in the Northwest.
Many of the participating institutions lie within the Columbia River watershed, giving the records they hold a geographic unity that extends beyond the borders of the individual states. Significant subject commonalities include the major economic forces in the region - agriculture, forest products, fisheries, and natural resources; urban and rural social and progressive movements; local, state, regional, and national politics; outdoor recreation; Native American language and culture; and the place of religious communities in the region. In many ways, the separate collections at the participating institutions represent one massive interrelated collection that documents the political, cultural, and natural history of the Northwest region.
Oregon State University is the lead institution on the 2-year grant project. Participating institutions are Washington State University (which will host the database and provide the technical infrastructure), University of Washington, Washington State Archives, Seattle Municipal Archives, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies (Western Washington University), Pacific Lutheran University, Whitworth College, Oregon Historical Society, University of Oregon, University of Idaho, Montana Historical Society, and University of Montana. Larry Landis is the Consortium Director and Elizabeth Nielsen is the Consortium Manager. Questions about the NWDA can be directed to either Larry (larry.landis@orst.edu; 541-737-0540) or Elizabeth (Elizabeth.Nielsen@orst.edu; 541-737-0543). A preliminary project website is available at http://nwda.wsulibs.wsu.edu .
Advisory Group Is Revising RLG EAD Guidelines
Dennis Meissner, chair
Shortly after the 2001 SAA annual meeting, RLG constituted an EAD Advisory Group that it tasked to revise the existing guidelines for encoding EAD finding aids to be included in its Archival Resources database. There are three principal reasons for doing so at this juncture: 1) an awareness that encoding practices had evolved considerably since pioneering repositories had begun submitted finding aids under the original 1998 RLG encoding guidelines; 2) an appreciation that the community of EAD practitioners had grown markedly since then, including notably a significant expansion outside the United States; and 3) the knowledge that the impending release of version 2 of the EAD DTD would of itself require changes in the encoding guidelines.
RLG Program Officer Merrilee Proffitt assembled a group of nine other experienced EAD users to evaluate and rework the existing guidelines. They are Greg Kinney (Bentley Library, University of Michigan), Mary Lacy (Library of Congress), Dennis Meissner (Minnesota Historical Society), Naomi Nelson (Emory University), Richard Rinehart (Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive), David Ruddy (Cornell University), William Stockting (Public Records Office, United Kingdom), Michael Webb (Bodleian Library, Oxford), and Timothy Young (Beinecke Library, Yale).
In discussing their charge the advisory group members settled on a couple key objectives. One is to identify, and guide the use of, a minimal set of EAD elements and attributes that, taken together, are complete enough to assure that information in finding aids is adequate to serve users' needs and yet lean enough so as not to impose excessive encoding overhead on creators. This, in itself, has proved daunting, though the group has recently succeeded in assembling its recommended set. The second objective is to assure that the guidelines stand a reasonable chance of meeting the needs of an international encoding community. In so doing, the advisory group has had to be as sensitive to the requirements of ISAD(G) as it has to those of APPM, MARC, and other descriptive standards more familiar to Americans. This has meant more work for the group, but it should help ensure a product that will facilitate interoperability in an international context, and which will be consistent with the outcome of the CUSTARD project. In addressing these challenges, the advisory group went beyond its initial mandate and has sought to articulate a set of best practice guidelines for EAD encoding in a union environment.
The draft guidelines, which are currently being fine-tuned by an editorial subcommittee of the advisory group, treat the full hierarchy of EAD elements and their attributes. They identify mandatory sets of elements and attributes within the <eadheader>, <archdesc>, and <dsc> areas of the structure, and consider description from the fonds/collection level all the way down to (optional) item-level control. Further, the guidelines go beyond what the group felt to be mandatory and recommend additional encoding that the group considers to represent best practices for describing archival materials within the EAD environment.
As soon as the draft guidelines are edited, the group intends to distribute them to a number of outside reviewers for comment. The finalized document will then be announced and made publicly available on the RLG website. If you have questions about this project, or if you would be interested in seeing the draft guidelines during the review period, please contact Merrilee Proffitt (mgp@notes.rlg.org ; 650-691-2309) or me (dennis.meissner@mnhs.org; 651-296-2496).
Goodbye to Diana Smith, Web Liaison
Diana recently left for her new life in England and thus had to relinquish her duties as the Section's webmaster. Diana volunteered to produce and host the website from its inception, and I am sure we want to thank her for all her hard work over the years. Diane Ducharme, also an archivist in the Beinecke's Manuscript Unit, is taking over web duties. The new address is: http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/descr/ . Contact Diane at Yale: diane.ducharme@yale.edu
Get Ready for Birmingham!!!
Description Section Meeting, Friday 23rd 8:00-10:00 AM