History
EAD originated in 1993, at the University of California, Berkeley. The project's goal was to create a data standard for describing archives, similar to the MARC standards for describing bibliographic materials. 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, 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.
Read more about this topic: Encoded Archival Description
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