Re: RE: Emerging metadata standards

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Robert Spindler
Tue, 28 Apr 1998 09:05:49 -0700


Greetings, I can give a little information on EAD since I've served on
the Society of American Archivists Task Force working on EAD development
since 1995 (although my role has been more of groupie than
programmer)...

In any case the TF is frantically working on final updates for EAD 1.0,
which is intended to be released in SGML and XML compliant versions this
summer. EAD is intended to be highly platform independent and should be
quite transportable over time, and the XML version is supposed to
eliminate the need for special SGML browsers...

EAD is intended to eventually serve as a standard for encoding finding
aids - the goal is to produce a Tag Library to define tags, and also to
produce Application Guidelines to provide examples of usage and offer
some "best practices"...At some point I anticipate it will be proposed
to SAA for endorsement as an official archival standard.

Now perhaps someone can inform me - what is "RDF for tagging
archives"???

FYI: There is a "metadata institute" being offered in Washington DC next
week in which Dublin Core, EAD and I believe TEI and Warwick Framework
will be addressed....

Rob Spindler, Head
Dept. of Archives and Manuscripts
Arizona State University Libraries, Box 871006 Tempe, AZ 85287

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stewart Brand [SMTP:]
> Sent: Monday, April 27, 1998 5:39 PM
> To: timeandbits
> Subject: Emerging metadata standards
>
> Roy Tenant's column in the 15 Apr 98 LIBRARY JOURNAL says that some
> metadata standards for digital archiving are emerging. Specifically:
> the
> Dublin Core of 15 elements (expandable) to tag an object; RDF for
> tagging
> archives, based on XML (the supposed advance on HTML); and EAD for
> machine-readable finding.
>
> What do pros here opine? Are these indeed emerging? Are they at
> least
> Pretty Good? Are they likely to be stable over time?
>
> Meta-question: is the process of emergent standards working well in
> this realm?
>