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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 44 | April 2000


Marking-up manuscripts

The National Library of Australia is one of the partners in an Australian Research Council funded project that will enhance access to Australian literary manuscripts through the use of Encoded Archival Description (EAD). The project director is Dr Toby Burrows of the University of Western Australia Library. Other participants are the State Library of New South Wales and the libraries of the Universities of Queensland, Sydney and the Australian Defence Force Academy.

At present, researchers seeking information about archival collections must search a variety of local databases, card files and manual finding aids individually. While the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts (RAAM) lists collections of Australian manuscripts, it does not provide detailed information about their contents. The Australian Literary Manuscripts Project will build a national database of finding aids using EAD as its data format.

EAD is a mark-up language applied to archival finding aids that provides a standard framework for information about collections, and the items or series within those collections. EAD is fast becoming the internationally accepted standard for electronic finding aids for archival and manuscript collections. Searching can be done in ways that are difficult or impossible with conventional finding aids. Where an author’s papers are held in a number of repositories, these dispersed collections can be searched as a single group and virtually reassembled as an intellectual whole.

The Australian Literary Manuscripts Project will implement an archival resource discovery service for at least 80 major collections of literary manuscripts held in the participating libraries. It will develop guidelines for the use of EAD, provide a model for archival resource discovery and develop a training strategy to disseminate knowledge and skills in the use of EAD in Australia. The literary finding aids database will be accessible through RAAM via hypertext links from collection-level records. Through RAAM, the contents of the database will be integrated into the Australian Literature Electronic Gateway, a project being developed to bring together a range of currently disparate research resources for Australian literature.

Participants in the Australian Literary Manuscripts Project were fortunate to receive three days intensive training from Daniel Pitti, the originator of EAD and Project Director at the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Project participants

have now returned to their libraries and have begun the work of encoding finding aids. While in Australia Daniel Pitti also gave an introduction to EAD at well-attended public seminars in Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth. More information about EAD is available on the National Library’s web site (www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/ead/).

Encoded Archival Description workshop

Daniel Pitti explaining the finer points of EAD during the three-day workshop recently held at the National Library

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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: tford@nla.gov.au

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