Стандарт кодирования архивного описания (EAD)

Standard for encoding archival record information
Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is a standard for encoding descriptive information regarding archival records.

Archival records differ from the items in a library collection because they are unique, usually unpublished and unavailable elsewhere, and because they exist as part of a collection that unifies them. For these reasons, archival description involves a hierarchical and progressive analysis that emphasizes the intellectual structure and content of the collection and does not always extend to the level of individual items within it. Following the development of technologies in the middle to late 1980s that enabled the descriptive encoding of machine readable findings, it became possible to consider the development of digital finding aids for archives. A second version was released in 2002, and the latest version, EAD3, was released in August 2015. The Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress are jointly responsible for the maintenance and development of EAD. EAD is now used around the world by archives, libraries, museums, national libraries and historical societies. At its highest level, an EAD finding aid includes control information about the description as well as a description of the collection itself. EAD3 was revised in 2018 to address concerns relating to the ease of access to archival descriptions and its ability to interface with other systems.

Archives by their very nature are different from libraries. While libraries contain individual items, such as books and journals, of which multiple, identical copies exist, archives contain records that are both unique and interrelated. Archives represent the activities of a person, family or organization that are created and accumulated naturally in the course of their ordinary activities. Archivists refer to the entire body or records of an individual or organization as its fonds; the fonds is thus a conceptual whole that reflects the process of the production or accumulation of records that share a common function or activity and exhibit a natural unity. The description of archival materials, therefore, involves a complex hierarchical and progressive analysis. In this way archival description focuses on the intellectual structure and content of the collection rather than its physical characteristics. A finding aid is a tool that helps users to find materials within an archive through the description of its contents. The unique nature of archival records and the geographic distribution of individual collections has presented a challenge for those wishing to locate and access them for over 150 years. The project's goal was to create a data standard for describing archives, similar to the MARC standards for describing bibliographic materials. The initial EAD Version 1.0 was released in the fall of 1998. Such a standard enables archives, museums, libraries, and manuscript repositories to list and describe their holdings in a manner that would be machine readable and therefore easy to search, maintain and exchange. Since its inception, many archives and special collections have adopted it. In addition to the development and maintenance work done by the Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) has developed and published a set of "Best Practice" implementation guidelines for EAD, which lays out mandatory, recommended, and optional elements and attributes. RLG has also provided a kind of clearinghouse for finding aids in EAD format, known as ArchiveGrid. Member libraries provide RLG the URL for their finding aids; RLG automatically harvests data from the finding aids, indexes it, and provides a search interface for the index, thus giving researchers the ability to search across several hundred institutions' collections with a single query. RLG also has developed the "RLG Report Card," an automated quality checking program that will analyze an EAD instance and report any areas where it diverges from the best practices guidelines. SAA's Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Description, which include international representation, embarked on a revision of the EAD standard in 2010. The latest version, EAD3, was released in August 2015.

A number of repositories in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and elsewhere have adopted and implemented EAD with varying levels of technical sophistication. One of the most ambitious efforts is the Online Archive of California, a union catalog of over 5,000 EAD finding aids covering manuscripts and images from institutions across the state. The French National Library Francois Mitterrand publishes more than 90,000 EAD finding aids covering archives and manuscripts.

The EAD standard's XML schema specifies the elements to be used to describe a manuscript collection as well as the arrangement of those elements (for example, which elements are required, or which are permitted inside which other elements). The EAD tag set has 146 elements and is used both to describe a collection as a whole, and also to encode a detailed multi level inventory of the collection. Many EAD elements have been, or can be, mapped to content standards (such as DACS and ISAD(G)) and other structural standards (such as MARC or Dublin Core), increasing the flexibility and interoperability of the data. EAD 1.0 was an SGML document type definition (DTD). EAD 2002, the second incarnation of EAD, was finalized in December 2002 and made available as an XML DTD. The latest version of EAD, EAD3, is available as both an XML schema and a DTD.

Note: Examples in this section are EAD2, and may not be valid against the EAD3 schema.

There have been some studies about how to cite EAD files with variable granularity. In particular, Buneman and Silvello proposed a rule based system to automatically create citation snippets to be used as references when citing XML data; a case study is based on EAD. Furthermore, Silvello proposed a framework, which learning from examples, automatically creates references at a different level of coarseness for XML files. This framework has been tested on the Library of Congress collection of EAD files.