Archives: EAD Standard of Archival description

The University at Buffalo (UB) Special Collections unit (New York) has announced the availability of a new database that vastly improves access to finding aids for the university's unique archival collections. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.

The finding aids now are encoded in a markup language developed specially for archives called Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and provide descriptions of special collections from UB's University Archives, the Poetry Collection, the Law Library and the Music Library.

Nancy Nuzzo, director of Special Collections, says, "Finding aids were traditionally paper inventories available only on site. The advent of the World Wide Web made it possible to deliver finding aids to a worldwide audience online, but without sophisticated indexing or searching capabilities. The use of EAD allows for much more sophisticated indexing and more detailed searching."

The new database was created using the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) platform developed for the California Digital Library. It has also been adopted for similar purposes at other institutions, including Indiana University, Northwestern University, University of Georgia and the University of Sydney. The platform is open-source code available for free online download. The database can be accessed directly at http://libweb1.lib.buffalo.edu:8080/xtf/search.

Nuzzo says the implementation of EAD at UB is the culmination of several years' work and was supported in part by three Regional Bibliographic Databases Program grants awarded through the Western New York Library Resources Council.