The APS is one of a number of institutions that comprise PACSCL. Fifteen of these institutions are part of a Delmas-funded legacy encoding project to outsource about 1,500 pages of paper per institution for conversion into EAD. Although serving these files was not an explicit part of the project, we've taken a step in that direction by writing stylesheets and developing a protocol for editing the outsourced documents and providing a means for future encoding. The stylesheets developed (three interconnected ones -- two in xsl (one written to the xsl:working draft specs so that it can be viewed using IE5+, the other written to the more powerful version 1.0 specs) and one in css -- have been adapted and/or adopted by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Temple Univ., Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore Peace Collection, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Hagley Museum, the Presbyterian Historical Society, and maybe others as well.
The other institutions in the grant (Winterthur, U. Penn, Phil. Museum of Art, the Wagner Free Institute of Science, the Academy of Natural Sciences) are in various places with regard to their implementation of EAD. (Wagner has dropped out of the project, PMA is on hold with another encoding grant in hand, and the others have received their files, but sit in different positions with respect to getting their files set to post).
EAD files are made available as a separate alphabetical list ( http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/eadfiles.htm ) and as links from our MOLE guide (Manuscripts On-Line: http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/browser/ ), which is an alphabetical listing of abstracts to all manuscript collections at the APS. In the former, explicit links are offered to both xml versions and html; in MOLE, a simple java browser-sniffer has tentatively (but not necessarily permanently) been installed to direct users to the xml or html version, as appropriate. Explicit (non-java dependent) links to the native xml and html files in MOLE will probably be placed some time soon. Links we will be provided to the EAD files from our OPAC when time allows.
At the APS, the process usually begins with paper inventories, which were outsourced to Apex for conversion to rough EAD courtesy of the Delmas grant. Subsequently, some work has been done with a few finding aids that were available in html, some paper finding aids have been scanned into MSWord, and some have been rekeyed. In every case, though, it was necessary to provide a rather significant degree of augmentation to the records to make them even minimally acceptable as finding aids. Old descriptive practices did not include many of the most basic elements that are essential to a proper finding aid.
Other than the out-sourced files, finding aids are marked up in MSWord using a plain-text template and edited as need be, again in plain-text. Some experimentation has been done with extracting data from an MSAccess database directly into an EAD plain-text template using the printmerge function. For container listings (which tend to be stored in different databases), it's not quite as simple, but works adequately so far, at least on a case by case basis.
Files are proofed largely by attaching an IE-compatible stylesheet and viewing through the website. Once proofed for content, they are validated in XMetaL and transformed to html using Saxon using the Version-1.0 stylesheet.