In 1999, the Historical Society received an LSTA grant from the Utah State Library Division to convert its finding aids to EAD. We completed over 700 finding aids during the course of the project-virtually all the legacy finding aids (many of those not yet converted are for collections that need to be reprocessed). We continue to add finding aids as we process additional collections. We had earlier scanned and OCR's all typewritten registers and inventories describing the Society's manuscript and photograph collections. We published these, along with more recent WordPerfect documents, as text files on the Internet.

Our collection's catalog, found on RLIN and on our own web site, includes catalog entries for each collection. Those with finding aids have a link to these legacy finding aids. Using grant funds, we hired two consultants experienced in EAD theory and practice. They advised us about how to implement EAD and suggested work processes. We then developed processes that fit our requirements. A computer-literate project archival technician, with little training, carried out these steps.

The processes include MARC to EAD and additional conversions (to generate a narrative skeleton), Word or WordPerfect tables and merges (to structure the container list), and BASIC programs to add EAD coding for the container lists and to merge the narrative with the container list. We used XmetaL to complete the finding aid, cutting and pasting when necessary from the legacy documents, and to produce the final XML files. Our cataloger reviewed, proofread, and edited each completed XML file. We used James Clark's XT and stylesheets to convert each XML file to HTML.