AAA’s current online finding aids provide detailed descriptions for over 100 collections. In 2005, AAA received a grant from the Terra Foundation of American Art to increase the number of EAD finding aids and to digitize a cross-section of collections.
AAA provides HTML documents listed on a Finding Aids web page on our website. For digitized collections, the XML finding aid is uploaded to AAA’s SQL Server Digital Collections Database and delivered to the website as “Collections Online,” using ColdFusion programming, which integrates the XML with the digital files of the scanned documents. Full text searching is available through the search software, Verity. All XML finding aids are also contributed to RLG’s Archive Grid through a monthly scheduled, automated process.
After an initial conversion of approximately 50 legacy finding aids with a grant from RLG, using a contracted encoding service, several Archives of American Art (AAA) staff members were trained in the EAD markup process at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School in 2001. AAA subsequently adopted the EAD Cookbook encoding protocol as the framework for it’s encoding, and we made some adaptations to the Cookbook templates and stylesheets to conform to our workflow and presentation preferences. This method uses NoteTab for encoding in XML, XSL stylesheets for presentation, and MSXSL to convert XML to HTML.
The majority of AAA’s processing staff have now received EAD training in-house and all new finding aids are created directly in EAD or encoded shortly after creation. Conversion of our legacy finding aids is ongoing.
EAD finding aids for digitized collections, known as "Collections Online," provide links from the folder headings to the digital files, thus serving as the metadata for those files and the primary navigational tool for viewing them, all within the context of the collection.
Two computer specialists on staff provide the technical support for software, stylesheets, Collections Online, and other programming. They are currently developing a Digital Collections Database which we hope will, in the future, store all our XML finding aids and generate HTML on the fly.