EAD patterns & conventions

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
2 min read

Integrating with Archon/Archivist Toolkit

Orgs would like to be able to keep using Archon/AT for description – some description happening in Archon, some in Hypatia
Round-tripping is out of question. In all cases, Fedora's content becomes the EAD of record
Archon & AT are inflexible - can't accommodate importing portions of EAD into those tools

Option: Manually merging EAD exports from Archon & Hypatia then re-importing into Hypatia
Option: Export EAD from Archon, Import it into Hypatia, then import content into Hypatia as parts of that EAD's collection

Hypatia & ArchiveSpace: What's the relationship?

Hypatia is becoming a tool for managing & describing collections of born-digital content. It is not an EAD editing tool or an EAD platform. Emphasis of Hypatia project: creating a workflow for dealing with born-digital materials. (not entirely solved, but made some real progress)

Archon & AT are tools for managing archival descriptions that support EAD export. ArchiveSpace is merging those tools, so seems to be aimed at managing archival descriptions. This supports item-level descriptions, but not tracking of the digital content itself.

Stanford has bypassed EAD entirely for some of its Hypatia collections because using EAD as an intermediary didn't make any sense when there was not an existing EAD yet.

Two current routes for getting content into Hypatia:

Source + EAD >> Hypatia
Source (ie FTK) >> Hypatia

Q: Will Hypatia become a general purpose solution for arrangement & description of born-digital archival content?
A: Tentatively yes, but this is subject to planning, funding, resource availability, demand, etc.

What are the possibilities for leveraging ArchiveSpace?
Unclear (too soon, but Mark Matienzo is on the team). Likely to embrace linked data & unique identifiers – a good opportunity for connecting data.

What are the Needs & Possibilities for using Hydra with EADs

Distinction: Publishing existing EADs vs. Creating new Archival Descriptions

Managing & Publishing existing EADs

lots of legacy/special collections background makes this transition difficult at some institutions

Notre Dame is putting EAD directly into Hydra – creating Fedora objects that correspond to the levels in EAD hierarchy.

  • import hand-edited EAD into fedora
  • have build UI forms for editing those descriptions within Fedora after exporting
  • Mixing VRA & EAD internally

Common Task: Translating EAD into other Formats (ie. EAD to MODS)

  • Could be useful to have a shared piece of software that handles these conversions for you (ie. Consolidate XSL transforms into a single executable)

Remember: There are a number of Blacklight-based solutions for integrating EADs into collection search & discovery interfaces. These solutions do not use Fedora but they're compatible with Hydra.

  • This misses out on opportunity to actively manage the descriptions as editable content within Fedora that can me connected with other content.

Closing Discussion

ND resolves to keep their internal implementation close to the Hypatia models. As long as the software returns proper EAD, the users don't care how it's represented inside.