International Standards for Digital Archives EAD, EAC, METS


Svetlana Adžić


Archives increasingly use the Internet to facilitate free, unhindered access to their holdings. The use of the international standards EAD (Encoded Archival Description), EAC (Encoded Archival Context) and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) is a major precondition for the exchange of descriptive information and metadata on digitized and digitally created archives for joint portals and gateways. The 3rd European conference on EAD, EAC and METS, held in Berlin on 24-26th April 2007, under the auspices of the Bundesarchivs and EURBICA (European Branch of International Council on Archives) offered some general information on these standards and the projects and presentations of digitized archives in online finding aids in the Internet for remote research, developed by some of the European and other archival services throughout the world. The Conference participants have been given a CD, which represents the project of the Federal Archives of Germany that developed the tools for producing archival finding aids with digital images of the records described. They use the international standards EAD, EAC and METS to assure the possibility of data sharing and to guarantee interoperability for joint gateways. The CD contains a test version of the MEX-Editors for simple EAD finding aids and METS files for linking images of textual records to online finding aids including documentation and short manuals and the website www.daofind.de.