Archive of Posts in "Updates"

Updated Examples in EADiva and an Apology

Posted by on June 12th, 2020 | Updates

The EADiva website no longer uses examples drawn from the Harry Potter universe. The new finding aid is up on GitHub and examples are incorporated into all 155 element pages. I am grateful to Christy Bailey-Tomecek for helping me in proof-reading. All errors are ones I introduced after her first read.

Several years ago, I began to hear from friends that J.K. Rowling was engaging online in transphobic circles. By 2019, she’d become so vocal about it that I resolved to rewrite the EADiva examples, which were all based in the Harry Potter universe. I decided to combine that work with moving EADiva from WordPress to a static site generator.

As her rhetoric escalated from 2019 to 2020, I continued to justify not yet addressing it by telling myself I was going to get to it as part of this planned project.

But that did not change the experience of people using the site.

I am sorry that I let it get to a crisis point to change. I have known for several years that she is outspokenly transphobic toward trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people. I should not have waited until her words reached a crisis point of hate to remove references to her work. I deeply regret my passivity in leaving these examples up this long.

I also acknowledge and apologize for a second reason that I should not have left these up as long as I did, a reason that I should have chosen a different subject for the examples entirely. Although Rowling’s open transphobia developed after I created the examples in 2014, the many instances of racism in the series have been discussed for ages. Every fictional world may be problematic, but I chose to work in this world when creating the EAD3 examples in 2014, long after I’d heard what should have been more than enough.

I apologize to those whom I made feel less welcome or reminded of hate when creating and leaving up these examples. For not being mindful of they harm they could cause. For only addressing it now as these reach a crisis point. I will do my best to do better in the future.

(this post is cross-posted with my personal blog)

5 Years in a Reflection on EADiva

Posted by on May 30th, 2018 | Business, Updates

I’ve posted a reflection on the 5-year existence of the EADiva on RuthTillman.com. From its opening…

5 years ago, on May 18, 2013, posted introduced EADiva to the world. I’d been working on the project since the previous fall—I bought the domain name in September 2012. Looking back now, I’m still on board with the objectives I stated in that first post:

My goal in creating this site was to make a resource oriented toward people who are attempting to learn EAD but may not have much more experience with XML than one gets in basic library school classes. The Library of Congress’s tag library uses some terms which may confuse a person who is unable to read a DTD. Attributes are described separately from elements, causing a need for much back-and-forth to understand how they relate to the elements. Element pages also don’t link to the elements they mention, making the user spend much more time navigating.

I continue to hope that lowering barriers to technical aspects of our work will not only aid people in getting their initial questions answered, but build their comfort and enable further exploration and understanding. And in these five years, I’ve reflected a lot on where this project may be helpful and where it inadvertently reinforces a poorer understanding of archival description which has been a problem in our field. read the rest and also leave a comment on how you’ve used it….

Now with more DACS!

Posted by on June 28th, 2013 | EAD 2002, Updates

The contents of this post relate to EAD 2002.

Thanks to some good feedback I got this past week, I’ve integrated DACS references into relevant pages, using the DACS/EAD cross-reference from Appendix C of the DACS manual (PDF). Unfortunately, DACS is not available in a format like that of EADiva or the EAD tag library, which meant I couldn’t actually link. So I gave section and page numbers, which should help people quickly locate the right material in the PDF file.

My integration came entirely from the crosswalk, so not every element has a DACS reference.