EAD Help
Pages
Maintained by the SAA-sponsored EAD Roundtable
Tools & Helper FilesThis page includes links to tools developed by other implementors that may help you to more effectively use particular software products to create, optimize, or deliver finding aids encoded in EAD.
The Archivists’ ToolkitTM (http:www.archiviststoolkit.org) is the first, and the first open source, application to provide broad, integrated support for the management of archives. It is intended for a wide range of archival repositories, large and small: academic, corporate, and government archives; historical societies; and museums. In the project’s first development phase, functionality was built to support accessioning and describing archival materials; establishing names and subjects associated with the archival materials, including the names of donors; managing locations for the materials; and importing / exporting EAD encoded finding aids and MARCXML records, as well as exporting METS records.
Version 1.0 of the Archivists’ ToolkitTM was released on December 17, 2006, under an Educational Community License, version 1.0. The project has been generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
EAD XForms Tool (ZIP)
User
Guide (Word) Release date: Sept. 2006
This tool uses XForms
to enable the creation of EAD finding aids without the need to deal with XML markup. The
form was developed by Justin Banks at Austin College and all of the software necessary
to use it is available for free. For more information, refer to the User Guide.
EAD Tools Survey 
PDF Release
date: Aug. 2005
This survey seeks to provide a sketch of the current tool landscape
in order to present information about tools available to smaller institutions which may
help expedite wider adoption of the standard.
RLG's EAD Report Card (released Jan. 2005) is the
first automated program for checking the quality of your EAD encoding. Created by
popular demand, this Web application supplements RLG's award-winning RLG Best Practice Guidelines for Encoded
Archival Description . Choose a finding aid, and the program
will flag any discrepancies, taking you to the relevant section of the encoding
guidelines so that you may correct your finding aid accordingly.
RLG commissioned the EAD Report Card as part of their continuing commitment to making archival collections more accessible on the Web. In addition to the guidelines and the report card, RLG also provides access to RLG Archival Resources, a database of archival materials; all institutions are encouraged to submit their finding aids to this database.
EAD Cookbook 2002 Release date: Mar. 2004
The EAD Cookbook 2002 provides practical, step-by-step assistance with the implementation of EAD. The current version of the Cookbook was updated from the first edition to comply with EAD 2002, to acknowledge the shift of the EAD community from SGML to XML, and to offer additional XSLT stylesheet options.
EAD Cookbook Release date: July 2000
The original EAD Cookbook was released in July 2000 to provide the EAD community with assistance in getting started using EAD. It was written to support the now superceded EAD Version 1.0.
Here is the New eadnotetab.exe self extracting zip file. (Here is the old version 1.0.) You can download it or install it from this location. This file will create a directory called "eadcb" on drive C of your computer. Before using it, read the instuctions to install and configure all components--see ReadMe in main directory to begin.
Please send comments on this beta version to Chris Prom. Comments received by January 15, 2001 will be evaluated for inclusion in the final distribution of this tool. Group your comments in the following areas:
Archon is a web application for managing information about archives and manuscript collections. It automatically publishes descriptive information and digital objects in a searchable and browseable website. The output can be easily customized. It also as exports data using standard formats such as EAD and MARC21. The present and future releases of Archon will be freely avaialable for non-commercial use. -- Chris Prom, July 2006
Archon is an easy-to-use tool for managing information about archives and manuscripts. Archon's powerful scripts automatically publish descriptive information and digital archives in a searchable and browseable website--as well as export data using standard formats such as EAD. With Archon, there is no need to encode a document in xml, input a catalog record, or program a sytlesheet!
Here's to hoping that we can grow a shared space of stylesheets created by our community. Your stylesheets can be complete, proof-of-concept, started-but-not-quite-finished, under development, whatever. Just send them to this site's maintainer.
tri-XMLdate-normalizer.pl 
PERL Release date:
Aug. 2002
This is a Perl script that will normalize dates in an existing finding aid to ISO 8601.
It reads in the content of a <unitdate> element, then creates
and inserts a normal ="" attribute. It is still in the beta test version,
so comments are welcome.
The script will work with most date formats familiar to archivists. Any unrecognized
date formats cause the script to pause, and prompt the encoder to enter the normalized
form of the date. This will create the normal ="" attribute, while leaving
the displaying date in the "nonstandard" format.
Please note that it has only been tested in Windows with ActivePerl 5.8.3.809. It
requires the XML::Twig and HTML::Entities modules. After saving the file on
a Windows machine, you might need to add the extension ".pl" to the script in order for
it to run.
The script was written by Jason Casden at the Ohio State University Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute. Comments or reports of problems can be sent to him at casden@gmail.com
An XSLT stylesheet, with accompanying documentation and XSLT transformation engine (SAXON)
MSFT WORD Release
date: Nov. 2003 PDF Release date: Nov. 2003Objective:
Provide a simple and bare bones open source conversion toolkit
for EAD 1.0 to EAD 2002. Observe and achieve the following: SGML to XML conversion; EAD
1.0 to EAD 2002 tag set update/substitution; build into EAD 2002 output local values as
well as substitution attributes and/or elements; generate an exhaustive report_x.htm
informing the user of any and all changes made by the stylesheet insuring that data will
be retained based on user judgements.