NCEAD is a collaborative EAD project whose participants are North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, State Archives of North Carolina, and Duke University. This project is funded in part by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. At this point, each NCEAD institution creates, maintains, and supports its own EAD finding aids and access to them. Using the NCEAD Application Guidelines (NCEAD AG), this consortium seeks to standardize EAD encoding at the four institutions in order to present users with a set of consistently encoded finding aids. Future possibilities for common display and searching mechanisms are under consideration. Each of the four institutions decide which finding aids to encode and how to integrate EAD and the NCEAD AG into their workflow. The two primary software choices are XMetaL and Notetab and each is accompanied by instructions for use, template documents, and macros. The NCEAD AG are focused primarily on the header and collection level information but also cover some aspects of the container list. As best practices for encoding visual materials, container information, and other facets of finding aids are developed they will be included in the NCEAD AG and applied to NCEAD institutions.

NCEAD is also working with the LSTA funded North Carolina-Exploring Cultural Heritage Online (NC-ECHO) project ( www.ncecho.org ) with the aim of providing encoding tools to participating cultural repositories in North Carolina.