[MCN-L] Encoded Archival Description in museums

[Ethan Gruber]

Hi Mary and Guenter,

Thanks for the replies.  I have checked out CDWA, and, like VRA Core, I
think it lacks a good way of describing organizational hierarchies and
applying the rich textual description that EAD does.  I think that the best
solution is something in between EAD and CDWA, preserving the contextual
nodes of EAD, but with the ontology specific to art museums that CDWA
offers.  Of course, one's choice of metadata is dependent upon what one
wants in a user interface.  I wanted publication-quality essays, which EAD
can deliver with descgrp and scopecontents, complete with footnotes,
bibliographies, tables, figures, lists, etc.  Essays were a fundamental
feature of the project and ultimately why I decided against using CDWA or
VRA Core.

Also, and maybe this is just nit-picky, but I don't like the way CDWA is
written.  It's very verbose and there seems to be a general resistence to
using attributes, which also makes it fairly inflexible for describing
certain objects or features.

Ethan

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 1:30 PM, M. Elings <melings at library.berkeley.edu>wrote:

> Ethan,
> I am not sure how widely used it is currently, but there was a
> project some years ago that you might look into called the Museums
> and the Online Archive of California (MOAC) project
> (http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/moac/classic), which started out to
> encode museum collections using EAD. The outcomes and follow-on
> projects were interesting but the museum's final assessment seems to
> have been that EAD was too archives--centric and that museums needed
> an xml schema more relevant to their descriptive practices. CDWAlite
> is potentially that solution.
>
> Mary W. Elings
> Archivist for Digital Collections
> The Bancroft Library
> University of California
> Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
> melings*library.berkeley.edu
> Ph 510-643-2273
> Fx 510-643-2548
>
> At 10:05 AM 5/14/2009, Ethan Gruber wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I'm a developer in a library that deals with a lot of special collections
> >objects.  I've dealt with traditional museum-type objects, such as ancient
> >coins and the challenges in providing access to them online.  I used
> Encoded
> >Archival Description (EAD) to describe them quite robustly in XML.  This
> is
> >a fairly standard schema in libraries, and I was wondering to what extent
> >EAD is used by museums to describe their own collections.  I have
> presented
> >at two conferences in the last year (Archiving 2008 and Computer
> >Applications in Archaeology in 2009) regarding EAD for numismatics, and I
> >have received a number of comments that suggest EAD is rarely used in that
> >capacity by museums, especially European ones.
> >
> >If anyone on this list can offer their insights into EAD in museums, I
> would
> >appreciate it.  For further reference, the project website is:
> >http://coins.lib.virginia.edu/ and the documentation section has a draft
> of
> >best practices guidelines and the powerpoint presentation I recently gave.
> >
> >Ethan Gruber
> >University of Virginia Library
> >_______________________________________________
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