Archives Online: Bringing the past to the present by way of the future

Abstract

Archives Online (http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/findingaids) is a portal for accessing descriptions of Special Collections and Archives - ones chiefly containing materials other than books - from libraries, archives, and other units at Indiana University Bloomington and from other institutions around the state of Indiana. Collection descriptions (also called finding aids) in Archives Online at IU are encoded according to the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format. Since 2005 we have been publishing finding aids encoded in EAD2002 (http://www.loc.gov/ead/) using XML templates edited in the Oxygen XML Editor. IU currently hosts more than 1,000 finding aids online with over 35,000 digitized objects connected and viewable through these collection descriptions. This system has worked very well for us but there is an ever-increasing backlog of archival and special collections and potentially quicker ways to produce these encoded descriptions. Additionally, the Society of American Archivists officially adopted EAD3, the next version of the Encoded Archival Description metadata standard, as the new standard in July 2015. This new version of EAD provides new ways to encode archival description for increased sharing and access online. We’ll discuss our investigations into quicker production of encoded collection descriptions as well as our plans for implementing EAD3 at Indiana University.