Northwest Digital Archives Tools

• NWDA Best Practices for Encoded Archival Description (EAD) (PDF) (Version 3.4, 2008-01-30)

• NWDA Oral History Encoding Guidelines (PDF) (Revised 2005-12-22)

• NWDA Headings and Labels for Stylesheet Display

• Browsing Terms for NWDA Finding Aids (revised 2006-01-30) 

Support for Encoding Finding Aids:

• XMetal Documentation (Revised 2008-04)

• Oxygen Documentation (Revised 2008-04)

• Helper files:
• ead.dtd
• ead.css
• ead.tbr
• ead.ctm
• NWDA encoding template (Revised 2008-04-08)
  

NWDA Resources:

• How many of your institution's finding aids were retrieved last month? Find out at the Database Reports Site.

• We're always working to improve the NWDA site for our researchers. See what's up next at the NWDA Development Site.

• The NWDA Utility Site is your destination for getting ARKs, using the compliance checker and submitting your finding aids to the database. You must be a NWDA member with a login and password to access this site.

• Doing a presentation? Use the NWDA General Powerpoint for an overview of the program; customize it to fit your needs.
  

Converting EAD Finding Aids into MARCXML:

• Mark Carlson’s tool at the University of Washington

• Terry Reese’s tool at Oregon State University The stylesheet needed for this program is at http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/xslt/EADlitetoMARC21slimXML.xsl   

• Thinking about EAD in the future, but not ready to do it yet? Use the Northwest Archives Processing Initiative (NWAPI) finding aid standard (Version 2, February 2006) to create finding aids that are fully compliant with DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard) and can easily be encoded later.
  

• ReplaceEM is a freeware search and replace tool for Windows that performs global edits. It's handy for making changes to batches of EAD files. www.orbit.org/replace

• Documentation for Add-a-Link to Digital Content System (Version 1, 2007-11-25)

• Oregon State University's Instructions for Preparing Collection-Level Finding Aids (2008-02-29)

• The Utah State Archives' webcast of Instructions for Producing Container Lists using Excel and Word mail merge (2008)
  

• Instructions for Exporting Container Lists from Access (2008-05-22)