The Five College Finding Aids Access Project was a collaborative effort of the Archives and Special Collections of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This three and a half year project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, resulted in the conversion and publishing of over 900 finding aids. The five institutions have continued to encode and publish finding aids since the project's completion in May 2005.
XML files are converted to HTML on the fly using Cocoon, a suite of open source XML publishing tools. Lucene, which is also open source, is the software used for indexing and searching the finding aids.
Legacy finding aids were converted using a variety of tools. Most finding aids were in Microsoft Word or WordPerfect format. For these, Perl scripts were developed to automate encoding of the container lists. The rest of the information in the finding aid was converted by student encoders who entered data into a web-based interface that used CGI scripts to encode the data in XML. One institution's finding aids were in a MARC-compliant database. These finding aids were converted by exporting MARC binary files from the database, translating those files into MARC XML format using scripts available from the Library of Congress, then transforming the MARC XML to EAD using an XSLT stylesheet. New finding aids are being encoded using NoteTab Pro and a specially modified version of Chris Prom's EAD Cookbook tools for NoteTab.