<author> Author

<author> “institution(s) or individual(s) responsible for compiling the intellectual content of the finding aid.” (italics mine.) It need not be just a name but may include a statement of responsibility or clarification about the role played. It can only be used within <titlepage> or <titlestmt>.

Other authors not included in the <author> element: the <creation> element inside <profiledesc> is used to designate the finding aid’s encoder (if different…if the same, you may include the redundant information or leave it out). <persname> or <corpname>,/a> with a ROLE attribute can be used to designate an author within <bibref>. The <origination> element designates the person who compiled, collected, or created the materials in the actual archival collection.

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.

Subelements

<author> can (and probably should) include PCDATA. It has no required subelements but should include the subtitle as PCDATA.

It can also contain a few generic subelements: <emph>, <extptr>, <lb>, and <ptr>.

Our EAD file so far

Let’s put in an author:

<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</author>
			</titlestmt>
		</filedesc>
		<profiledesc>
		</profiledesc>
		<revisiondesc>
		</revisiondesc>
	</eadheader>
	<frontmatter><!--we're going to display it here just to show how it's used-->
	</frontmatter>
	<archdesc>
	</archdesc>
</ead>

I could’ve also put in a list of names, or “this finding aid was created by Ruth K. Tillman,” or “the staff of the S. J. Bell Memorial Library.”

EAD tag library entry for <author>.