XML encoded finding aids are delivered via on-the-fly conversion to HTML, using the University of Michigan DLXS suite. Our site went public in March 2002. We have a cooperative arrangement with the University of Wisconsin General Library System which provides programming and other technical expertise and both hosts and supports the site. Historical Society staff is responsible for providing validated content to the site, identifying problems and working with the U.W. staff as needed to resolve them, adding links to MARC catalog entries leading to the finding aids, and addressing such issues as publicizing the finding aids site and making sure its workings are clear to users. We are currently working with the U.W. staff to migrate our finding aids from Version 1.0 to Version 2002 of the DTD and to a new U.W. system-wide site; we expect this site to go live in Spring 2007.
As of February 2007 our site contains approximately 3050 finding aids comprising the equivalent of roughly 25,000 paper pages. 1150 of these were encoded from paper originals by Apex in 2000. The remainder have been encoded in-house, some from paper and some from word processing documents. Until recently we were encoding finding aids in SGML in Version 1.0 of the DTD, through the use of webforms, macros, cutting and pasting, and a series of find and replaces. The mark-up was completed in Microsoft Word and then validated in Author-Editor.
In preparation for the upgrade of our finding aid site to Version 2002, we now do encoding in NoteTab Pro using the EAD Cookbook 2002. We use templates for the narrative portion of the finding aid. For container lists, we use the auto box list feature included with the EAD Cookbook as well as manual mark-up using customized clips. For the few finding aids for which we do not have electronic copies, or for which we cannot create cleanly scanned copies, we use the forms provided in the EAD Cookbook 2002 or mark them up manually. Often a combination of these methods are employed on a single finding aid.
Prior to mark-up, finding aids are cleaned up in Microsoft Word and macros are run that insert entity codes for non-XML characters and clean up some formatting issues in preparation for mark-up. After mark-up, a final clip is run in NoteTab Pro that deletes unused tags in the template and ensures that component levels are nested properly. So far all of our mark-up is retrospective; we hope to begin applying EAD encoding to newly created finding aids within the next couple months. EAD work is done through a portion of my time; by my predecessor, Karen Baumann, who has stayed on part-time to work on the EAD project; and by part-time students who do most of the scanning and mark-up. Because our mark-up is generally not very deep and because we made the decision not to employ <controlaccess> since we already have a MARC catalog with these controlled terms, our EAD site's indexing is limited to three choices: keyword, collection title, and repository. We will be adding to this list title of work (play, movie, book, etc.) when the site is upgraded.