MOAC museum partners prepare EAD encoded collection guides using EAD capable tools developed by MOAC. Partners then contribute finding aids to the central database system the California Digital Library chooses to implement for the larger OAC union database. These are served from the CDL's OAC server using the general OAC interface. However, the MOAC content is also served out on the MOAC website in a portal fashion, where searches into the central OAC database are limited to MOAC collection guides, and the results are transformed into the MOAC template using XSLT on the fly. In all cases we are using a centralized-decentralized model, where the text/SGML finding aids are stored centrally for search and display, but the images are stored locally on the home institutions's webserver and linked for display from within the central finding aid via the href attribute
Since museum-type records are often detailed at the item level and are often exported in a structured form from museum collection management systems for inclusion in the EAD finding aid, automation is feasible and desirable. We mark up the EAD header and scopecontent/bioghist info manually using A/E. But for the container lists, we export records from the collection managment system and either use the database to mark up the records as they are exported, OR export the records as tab-delimited text and write Word Macros to automatically mark up the records. Container lists with complex hierarchical relationships then take some extra hand manipulation, but most of the markup is still done automatically.