EAD
Help Pages 
Archives HubURL: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk
The Archives Hub is a collaborative project for describing archives held in universities and colleges throughout the United Kingdom. Around 150 institutions have their archives represented on the service: some 20,000 archives have been described so far.
Participating institutions send EAD-encoded descriptions to the central service team at the University of Manchester. There is an online ISAD(G)/EAD template at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/eadform2002.html or repositories can create their own EAD files, following the Archives Hub guidelines at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/arch/dcg.shtml . Institutions running the Spokes software create and upload their files locally, using whichever software suits them best.
The Archives Hub uses a combination of Cheshire II and Cheshire3 software to deliver its finding aids. The central service is running Cheshire II, which provides web and Z39.50 interfaces to indexes of EAD2002 XML files. The EAD is converted on the fly to HTML for display to end-users of the web interface. Cheshire3 is being used by the distributed nodes ('Spokes') of the Hub. These are run by institutions who prefer to host their own EAD files. The Spokes software provides a customisable local web interface and also Z39.50 and SRU access to the files.
The Archives Hub gathers information from the Spokes when they are updated. A central index is created from all the indexes of the data held centrally and from the Spokes. Users' searches are then directed (using the Z39.50 protocol) only to those Spokes whose records will match. In 2006-2007 the central Hub will also be upgraded to use Cheshire3.
Jane Stevenson jane.stevensonl@manchester.ac.uk
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