On Dec 22, 2009, at 9:21 PM, Andrew Nagy wrote:
>> I'm curious if anyone on the list has experience with adding their EAD
>> documents into a larger discovery system?
>
> I believe Eric Morgan has done some work with VuFind and EAD documents - but
> I would defer on this to him.
Yes, and no. I have put EAD files into a "discovery system", specifically VUFind.
Yes, you can search our implementation of VUFind to identify collections described with EAD files. For example, see the following record describing the Association of Contemplative Sisters Records:
http://www.catholicresearch.net/Record/ACS
Once the record is displayed the user has the option of viewing the entire EAD file by following the link near the bottom of the page.
No, the entire EAD file is not necessarily in the discovery system. To incorporate EAD content I first used an XSL stylesheet written by Terry Reese to convert EAD files into MARCXML. I then used Index Data's yaz-marcdump program to convert the MARCXML into "standard" MARC. Finally, I imported the MARC records into VUFind along with sets of other MARC records describing things such as book collections (as opposed to archival collections).
The process is functional, but certainly not perfect. Because of limitations in MARC, some of the long fields in the EAD files do not get ported 100% completely. Similarly, there are fields in EAD files that do not map to MARC. Consequently, as with any data transformation, some content gets lost in the process. Finally, it is not possible to search the system using EAD-specific fields; everything is really in MARC.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Wed Dec 23 2009 - 07:08:13 EST