Making Collections Available for Metadata Harvesting

Editor's Notes

• #2: I looked at the collections of the University Archives and Manuscripts Division at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I wanted to find a way to make their finding aids available for metadata harvesting using EAD.
• #3: Under “Digital Resources” on the UNC-G University Archives and Manuscripts Website, users are able to browse some finding aids by title, collection number, or subject.
• #4: I chose the Elinor Glyn Papers as an example because it is a small collection.
• #5: You can see here in the page source that the finding aid is encoded into HTML only, with no Dublin Core or EAD elements. It appears to be an HTML template used for all of their finding aids online.
• #6: There isn’t an Online Archive of North Carolina like the OAC, but there is a website called NC ECHO which is a portal to online resources from repositories across the state. NC ECHO is home to the NCEAD working group, which promotes standardization among EAD finding aids. NC ECHO is not a service provider, nor is NCEAD. The metadata tools listed on the NC ECHO site includes a Dublin Core template, which allows institutions to add customized tags to their HTML documents. I was concerned about the use of EAD over simply adding Dublin Core to the existing HTML, which appears to be an alternate to encoding the finding aid in EAD, but decided to opt for EAD because it is specific to archival finding aids.
• #7: To be consistent with the goals of the NC ECHO working groups, I suggest that UNC Greensboro convert its HTML finding aids to EAD. These tags can be mapped down to Simple Dublin Core for exposure to OAIster. UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University and NC State participate in OAIster as well.