<abstract> Abstract

A very brief summary of the materials being described, used primarily to encode bits of biographical or historical information about the creator and abridged statements about the scope, content, arrangement, or other descriptive details about the archival unit or one of its components. It may be extracted from other fields, such as <bioghist> and <scopecontent>. Within a <c> <did>, it indicates information specific to that component.

It may occur within <did> or <archref>. For the purposes of this outline, we’ll be showing it inside <did>.

Attributes

  • ALTRENDER – not required. Use if the content of the element should be displayed or printed differently than the rendering established in a style sheet for other occurrences of the element.
  • AUDIENCE – not required. Use to set whether the element’s contents will be visible to external users or to internal ones. Possible values are: “internal” and “external.”
  • ID – not required. Creates an ID for element. Can be used for linking.
  • ENCODINGANALOG – not required. May contain information to map this tag to a particular element in another schema.
  • LABEL – not required. This can be used when a meaningful display label for an element can’t be derived by the stylesheet from its name. It is available in all <did> subelements.
  • LANGCODE – not required. The three-letter code for the language in which the abstract is written. It should come from ISO639-2b.
  • TYPE – not required. This attribute may be used within a number of elements. Its characteristics depend on the element to which it applies. There is no list of specific values for TYPE within <abstract>, but it may be used for encoding information.

Subelements

<abstract> will contain PCDATA itself and may contain the following generic elements: <abbr>, <archref>, <bibref>, <emph>, <expan>, <lb />, <linkgrp>, <ptr>, <ref>, and <title>.

Our EAD file so far

Let’s put in a basic abstract and not forget the LABEL attribute:

<ead>
	<eadheader>
		<eadid countrycode="us" mainagencycode="dgwl" url="http://www.eadiva.com/sample/">rkt-01</eadid>
		<filedesc>
			<titlestmt>
				<titleproper>Inventory of Something Useful for Learning EAD <date>2012-2013</date></titleproper>
				<subtitle>A totally awesome finding aid with a subtitle too</subtitle>
				<author>Ruth K. Tillman, the EADiva</author>
				<sponsor>Encoding thanks to EADiva's donation of her spare time.</sponsor>
			</titlestmt>
			<editionstmt><edition>1st ed.</edition>
			<p>Didn't need to specify since it's first edition, but wanted to use the fields.</p>
			</editionstmt>
			<publicationstmt>
				<date>2012</date>
				<publisher>EADiva.com</publisher>
				<address>
					<addressline>1600 Pennsylvania Ave</addressline>
					<addressline>Washington, DC, 20001</addressline>
					<addressline>Phone: 202-555-1234</addressline>
				</address>
			</publicationstmt>
			<seriesstmt><p>Bell Family Papers</p>
			</seriesstmt>
			<notestmt>
				<note>
					<p>The materials in this finding aid are based on an actual collection of Sarah J. Bell Kitchin's letters.</p>
				</note>
				<note>
					<p>This finding aid was created as a project for the EADiva.com website.</p>
				</note>
			</notestmt>
		</filedesc>
		<profiledesc>
			<creation>This finding aid was encoded by Ruth K. Tillman, on <date normal="20121118">November 18th, 2012</date>, using Notepad++. Material was generated off the top of her head.</creation>
			<langusage>This finding aid is written in <language langcode="eng">English</language>.
			</langusage>
			<descrules>This finding aid was prepared using Ruth's understanding of EAD and her use of the LOC EAD 2002 official website.</descrules>
		</profiledesc>
		<revisiondesc>
			<change>
				<date normal="20121204">December 4, 2012</date>
				<item>This finding aid was edited by Ruth Tillman in order to clarify contents in eadheader.</item>
			</change>
		</revisiondesc>
	</eadheader>
	<frontmatter>
		<div><head>Preface</head>
		<p>This inventory was prepared as part of the EADiva website to demonstrate EAD encoding of finding aids. It encodes information about the collection of the papers of Sarah Bell Kitchin as well as made-up information used to make the finding aid use more example elements. Like this one.</p></div>
		<titlepage>
			<titleproper>Inventory of Something Useful for Learning EAD <date>2012-2013</date></titleproper>
			<subtitle>A totally awesome finding aid with a subtitle too</subtitle>
			<author>Ruth K. Tillman, the EADiva</author>
			<publisher>EADiva.com</publisher>
		</titlepage>
	</frontmatter>
	<archdesc level="collection">
		<did><head>Overview</head>
			<abstract label="Abstract">Sarah J. Bell Kitchin, a Peace Corps Volunteer and professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia. Her letters home from the Philippines (1967-1969) and Russia. Letters from members of the Bell family (1967-2000).
			</abstract>
		</did>
	</archdesc>
</ead>

EAD tag library entry for <abstract>.