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Research : Activities : Influence Proposed EAC Standard

Influence Proposed EAC Standard

This activity is now closed. The information on this page is provided for historical purposes only.

OCLC Research is a member of the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) Working Group. As a member, we collaborated with archivists internationally to develop, implement and test the integration of EAC-CPF (EAC for short) in existing international archival description and name authority systems. This work facilitated the publication of the EAC-CPF 2010 schema and tag library for encoding CPF agent descriptive information related to archival materials.

Background

EAC addresses practical problems found in the use of EAD (Encoded Archival Description), which includes all forms of descriptive data about archival records. Materials by or about a single entity might be found in many fonds or various repositories, so there is much redundant and inconsistent effort in recording information about the same entity.

This duplicative and incomplete information, embedded in silo-ed descriptions, bedevils both users and archivists who are finding, interpreting and creating references.

Impact

The primary purpose of EAC is to standardize the encoding of descriptions about corporate bodies, people and families, in order to enable the sharing, linking, discovery and display of this information in an electronic environment. It supports the linking of information about one agent to other agents, in order to discover the relationships amongst record-creating entities, and the linking to descriptions of archives and other materials.

EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context – Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families) is a communication structure for archival contextual information for individuals, corporate bodies and families. It supports the exchange of ISAAR (CPF)-compliant authority records.

Completed work: 

  • Administered EAC grant from the Delmas Foundation for the EAC Working Group meeting that was held in Bologna in May 2008.
  • Served as a member of the EAC Working Group.
  • Facilitated revision, publication and dissemination of EAC-CPF. The EAC-CPF 2010 schema and tag library was successfully reviewed and published.
  • Schaffner remains on the reconstituted EAC Working Group as an ex-officio member.

Outputs

The final draft of the EAC-CPF 2009 schema and tag library were available for review by the international community until 30 October 2009. The EAC-CPF 2010 was released on 01 March 2010.

Publications

  • Meissner, Dennis, and Jennifer Schaffner. 2010. "Introducing EAC-CPF." Archival Outlook, May/June: 10-11.

More Information

The EAC-CPF Web page containing the links to the schema and tag library is at: http://eac.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/.

Team Members

EAC Working Group:

  • Anila Angjeli, Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France)
  • Lina (Vasiliki) Bountouri, Ionian University
  • Karin Bredenberg, Riksarkivet (National Archives of Sweden)
  • Basil Dewhurst, National Library of Australia
  • Wendy Duff, University of Toronto, Faculty of Information
  • Hans-Jörg Lieder, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library)
  • Dennis Meissner, Minnesota Historical Society
  • Per-Gunnar Ottosson, Riksarkivet (National Archives of Sweden)
  • Victoria Peters, University of Strathclyde
  • Daniel Pitti, University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
  • Chris Prom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Bill Stockting, British Library
  • Stefano Vitali, Soprintendenza archivistica per l’Emilia-Romagna (Bologna)
  • Kathy Wisser, Simmons College, Graduate School of Library and Information Science

Sponsors

The Delmas Foundation



Last update: 10 November 2010.