January 2022 Archives West Upgrade
In January 2022, Archives West will be upgraded to use BaseX, an open-source database engine. The upgrade makes major back-end improvements to search operation in Archives West. It also supports improvements that are high priority for the A&M community. Read more about changes to Archives West.
Archives West Utility Site
The Utility Site is your destination for getting ARKs, using the compliance checker and submitting your finding aids to the database. (You must be a Archives & Manuscripts Service participant with a login and password to access this site.)
EAD Best Practices
EAD and Archives West Video Tutorials
The recordings are available to view anytime according to your needs, or can be used in sequence to support attendance of the five-part workshop series.
- Description and Encoding
- DACS Basics (Video)
- EAD Overview (Video)
- EAD Best Practices Overview (Video)
- Minimum Framework (Video)
- Component Level Description (Video)
- Digital Object Linking (Video)
- XML View (Video)
- Encoding Software (Video)
- Archives West Utility Site
- ARK Request (Video)
- Compliance Checker – update in progress
- Document Submission (Video)
- Revision and Re-Submission (Video)
- Repository Registry (Video)
Software Documentation
- XMetal Documentation (PDF)
- Oxygen Documentation (PDF)
Helper files for use with XMetaL or Oxygen
- ead.dtd (DTD)
- ead.css (CSS)
- ead.tbr (TBR)
- ead.ctm (CTM)
- EAD Encoding Template
Additional Encoding Support
Institutional Examples & Tools
Central Oregon Community College’s Instructions for Exporting Container Lists from Access (PDF)
Steady, a tool from the University of North Carolina for converting CSV to EAD XML (2011 February 16)
Converting EAD Finding Aids into MARCXML
Other Resources
- Encoded Archival Description home page at the Library of Congress
- EADiva, an alternative version of the EAD tag library
- Describing Archives A Content Standard (DACS), 2nd edition (2013)