Since 2005, EAD guides have been written in house for all newly processed Manuscript Collections. Our few legacy finding aids did not warrant conversion so all our collections fall into the newly processed category. Guides are written by the person arranging the collection who may be a student or an archivist and all adhere to the Best Practice Guidelines for Florida Institutions developed by John Nemmers.
A hard copy of the HTML is printed for use in the reading room. Guides are delivered on the fly from both our departmental web page and the Archives Florida union database, which is part of the PALMM cooperative initiative.
Most guides are written using Notetab or Notetab Light. This application uses clip libraries adapted by Elizabeth Konzak from libraries originally created by Chuck Thomas. The arranger enters the content when prompted and the EAD markup is added automatically. The XML is transformed to HTML within Notetab Light by code developed by Chris Prom, which uses the Msxsl.exe utility that invokes the Microsoft XML Parser and a stylesheet adapted from the EAD Cookbook by Judith Beale. More complicated guides are written directly in XMetal using templates created by Judith Beale. The tranformation uses the same stylesheet and XMetal's internal transformer.