I am at the 2004 TEI Annual Members’ Meeting at John Hopkins in Baltimore. We just got wireless so I can post notes on the talks.
Daniel Pitti from IATH gave the opening on the TEI and EAD.
What is the Encoded Archival Description, EAD?
It is not a descriptive standard. Describing Archives: A Content Standard from Society of American Archivists: 2004, is such a standard. EAD is not a controlled vocabulary, nor an archival management system. EAD is not a standard for the representation of archival records. It is just for describing.
Archival Records are “Byproducts of people living and working”. These could be individuals and families; or corporate/government bodies performing assigned or mandated functions and activities. Thus archives can be legal and historical evidence. Often used for settling disputes or writing history.
Most library stuff is published and what a library collects is a copy and therefore not unique, while archival materials are unique and unpublished. Archives usually described at collection or fond level. Finding aids describe them.
Inheritance principle – anything said at a higher level is inherited.
Universal union access is a goal so that you can ask “does it exist?”
Text in archives often divides between document-centric materials – manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, notebooks and data-centric materials like ledgers, certificates, accounts.
TEI is used typically for intense analysis of a text – intense scholarly editing of small amounts. EAD is about collections and therefore broader – consistency is more important. One can have heavy and idiosyncratic markup of individual text for a disciplinary purpose, but not for the archival community.
“Traditional scholarly communication is discontinuous. Digital electronic scholarly communication can be continuous.” What did Pitti mean by this?
The archival markup is one context. Disciplinary scholars have to take up and recontextualize materials. There is a negotiation between archivists and scholars. Thus the same materials could be encoded by multiple communities.
What the library/archival community want out of TEI:
- TEI Extra-Lite
- Namespace: EAD, TEI, MODS, METS
- Training for directors
- Tagging training
- Tools for quality control
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