New EAD Tool

I am the Senior Archives Advisor for the History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One of my responsibilities for the past couple of years has been to work with our Church History Library team to develop tools to improve access to the extensive holdings of our library, which includes published library materials and extensive archives and manuscript holdings.

We have opened our new Church History library catalog to the public. It is built upon two Ex Libris products: Aleph for the catalog and Primo for discovery. In addition, I am responsible for a new tool for the creation and delivery of finding aids.

We began the development of the EAD database as an improved, web-centric, public access tool. We had expected to use available EAD creation tools for authoring and editing each EAD finding aid. We soon found that we could develop an EAD tool with a single user interface, both for the staff (those who create, edit, and approve archival finding aids) and for researchers (those who will search and browse the finding aids).

The administrative view has been in production now for many months. The public view will be released within a few months. Until then, I have produced two YouTube videos to illustrate the tool. One video, EAD Tool Part 1, illustrates how the public view will work. And the other, EAD Tool Part 2, shows how archivists can use it to create and view finding aids.

The following is a general description of the tool.

The Church History Library EAD tool (tentatively dubbed ET) is, at its heart a repository of archival finding aids created according to EAD and DACS standards and from which we may produce EAD instances for each. Each finding aid is created using database forms for each of the non-dsc sections. The dsc components are each created using forms for each logical level and are arranged (and may be rearranged) using a WYSIWYG creation tool that allows drag-and-drop (as permitted by business rules). The finding aid may be created incrementally over several sessions and then, after completion and approval, published.

Finding aids marked published will then be available on the Web for discovery and browsing. Discovery will be through Primo, our discovery tool. If a search locates a collection-level description, the user will be able to open a Web view of the finding aid and then select one of two tabs: an overview (with scope and content and other information) or browse (to see the collection contents).

The browse view, which is also used by the finding aid creators and editors, is designed to improve on a traditional finding aid page view. We borrowed the idea of play lists for navigation and display. We display columns showing multiple levels of content with clear visual cues about relationships, paths, and logical levels. Selecting a component may open a new column with sub-components and will always include any component-level data.

We are developing other services that may be selected for components, including a means to place a digitization request, or, if already digitized, a link to the digitized content.

Another Primo search result may point to finding aid components. We will index the words of the component title, the date ranges, and the words in the scope and content note. User will be able to limit Primo searches to finding aids only, using a pre-search qualifier or a post-search facet. They will be able to use other qualifiers to further focus the search. Selecting a component from the resulting search results will take the user to the precise EAD component, as though the user had browsed to that location.
Let me know what you think.