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Before the project began, the CHS made use of collection-level MARC records, available at ReQuest, Connecticut's online union catalog, and individual catalog cards that detail its collections at the item level. The aim of the NHPRC funded project was to create EAD compliant finding aids to the CHS's most significant collections, and further to establish a program for continuity in adopting EAD as its primary manuscripts access format. The CHS will continue to produce collection level MARC records and item-level catalog cards. Since no existing finding aids were initially available, the project team had free-reign in their adoption of EAD tags. This also meant that the team was free to devise a format for the finding aids without the need to consider legacy versions. Rather than opting for purchasing expensive SGML editing software (or new dedicated EAD editing software) the project team was content to create its finding aids in commonly, and cheaply, available software. This choice was made in the belief that smaller institutions might benefit from CHS' experiments with EAD implementation on a near shoe-string budget. Hardware: Software: The first finding aid was written in WordPerfect 8, and once validated, formed the base for future finding aid creation. The tag-set employed in this first finding aid was then used in a Word 97 template. The archivist would enter data into the template (into pre-defined 'slots'), and not worry too much about the markup. The resulting file was then loaded into WordPerfect 8 and validated against the EAD DTD. Once a valid SGML file had been created it was converted to HTML for display on the CHS website by in-house WordPerfect macros. Finding aids are created by two methods, depending on format: SGML: Using a Word 97 template (now in its third incarnation), and validated in WordPerfect. XML: Using extensions created in-house for NoteTab Pro, and validated using Internet Explorer 5.0 Whatever the format of creation, the
finding aid is made valid XML, and then
converted to HTML by application of an
XSL stylesheet. XT,
an XSL processor by James Clark, is used
to transform the source XML to HTML.
NOTE: XSL is not yet a standard, but a
working draft of the World Wide Web Consortium.
Once the XSL specificfation becomes a W3C standard the CHS will formally adopt XML as its primary EAD display medium. Until then, EAD finding aids will be primarily available in HTML, and only partially (on an experimental basis only) through XML using Internet Explorer 5.0. There may well be releases of EAD finding aids formatted using CSS stylesheets when Netscape 5 is released.
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| Page author: Stephen Yearl | ||||||||