The MoMA Archives' online finding aids represent nearly seventy collections of museum and departmental records and personal papers and manuscripts. All were encoded and placed online between 2006 and 2007 in a retrospective conversion project partially funded by a grant from The Henry Luce Foundation.
Our EAD finding aids are encoded in EAD 2002 and converted into HTML locally using Saxon and a heavily modified XSLT style sheet from New York University. We use a framed layout in the browser and the four HTML files for every finding aid are stored in a single directory online. A search software package provided by the Museum's IT department allows keyword searching (with a limited vocabulary of special characters) so users can search across finding aids. The Museum's library catalog, DADABASE, contains MARC records of the collections and direct links to the HTML files. The finding aids are included in ArchiveGrid and are discoverable by Internet search engines such as Google.
Prior versions of our finding aids were equally divided between paper originals and electronic documents (Microsoft Word and Word Perfect) while a few had been previously encoded in EAD 1.0. Paper documents were scanned and run through OCR, and all files were then manually encoded in NoteTab according to a template developed by the Archives. Steps were taken wherever possible to bring description up to DACS standards. New finding aids are written and encoded directly in NoteTab.