Present
The group met in the Board Room, Third Floor, Newcomb Hall at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 3, 1999.
Thomas Loftus distributed a preliminary draft of the NEH grant proposal. Some information remains to be included and he reminded the group of some of the missing pieces.
Edward Gaynor introduced Thorny Staples of the Systems Office of Alderman Library who demonstrated the "MU-form," a web-based template that could be used to input Encoded Archival Description. ["MU is a set of Perl programs which, in combination with a Web server, allow one person or a group of people to create and modify SGML files, using standard forms-capable Web browsers as the editing interface. MU supports multiple editing sessions through lock-files, and it builds its forms from simple ASCII-text tag templates."] It would treat the EAD in three sections and one will be able to lock and unlock sections, parse, and publish. Even though it would allow cutting and pasting from a previously word processed finding aid and will even permit the incorporation of previously tagged text, it will probably be most successful when used for original input. It is not intended to substitute for knowledge of the EAD format. UVA will continue to test and refine the "MU-form" this summer with the help of Marsha Trimble, the Law Library Archivist, and Joan Echtenkamp Klein, the Claude Moore Health Sciences Historical Collections Librarian.
Daniel Pitti distributed printouts of corrected versions of the finding aids that were sent to him to check.
Most of the two days of the meeting/workshop were spent developing VIVA retrospective conversion guidelines under the guidance of Daniel Pitti of IATH. Daniel guided the group through the California retrospective conversion guidelines drafted in 1997 and based on EAD beta. The VIVA Special Collections Committee's task is to reach consensus among the participating repositories on how the VIVA EAD (using Version 1) will be implemented.
Uniformity of markup is essential for indexing, display and to standardize intellectual content so that the user can expect the data to be delivered in a certain way across the database. It was suggested that later in the process, sub-committees may have to be formed to look at particular aspects: user interface, indexing, etc. Some key points made in the guideline revisions included consistency in the use of head labels, the order of top-level elements and consistency in hypertext and hypermedia links.
The workshop broke in late afternoon to resume the next morning.
We reconvened at 9:00 a.m. in Room 481 of Newcomb Hall on Friday, June 4, 1999. After the conclusion of the guidelines discussion on the second day, the committee met to discuss grant proposal documents further and to decide on future meetings. It was decided to meet either July 23 or 30 at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond at 11:00 a.m. At the July meeting, the group would look at the revised guidelines again after Daniel Pitti rewrites them to reflect decisions made at this meeting. Any decision deferred or any question that needed further research could be examined in July.
A September meeting would be held to look at marked-up finding aids. Each institution will bring an EAD encoded inventory (having chosen a short inventory representative of all their inventories) based on the VIVA guidelines and in addition, all institutions will mark up the same finding aid. It was suggested that finding aid be one from William and Mary. This plan was to carry out a suggestion made by Daniel Pitti so that the committee can make sure each one understands and is applying the guidelines properly and so that each institution will end up with a model to go by for its finding aids.
The meeting and workshop adjourned at mid-afternoon.
Submitted by Susan A. Riggs (College of William and Mary)
added June 14, 1999 (GMc)