Archive of Posts in "Business"

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….

Site Functionality Improvement: Linked DACS

Posted by on November 25th, 2013 | Business, EAD 2002

The contents of this post relate to EAD 2002.

Now that DACS is available in HTML online, I’ve gone through the relevant element pages and included links to the specific DACS page which applies to them. A small update, but one which I think will make DACS-compliant encoding much easier.

Introducing EADiva

Posted by on May 18th, 2013 | Business, EAD 2002

The contents of this post relate to EAD 2002.

Welcome to EADiva, a plain-talking EAD tag library. Despite its tongue-in-cheek name, I have taken this project very seriously and have attempted to create a friendlier version of the Library of Congress EAD tag library.

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 cannot overstate how much the LoC’s tag library has helped me over the past 7 months as I’ve written the element pages for this site. It is a tremendous resource and I outline some of its advantages on the about page for this site. But when I studied it for my library school projects, I saw room for improvement. I saw places where I knew that some of my fellow students who have less technical backgrounds might find themselves frustrated. I think many people who could use a better knowledge of EAD, students and professionals alike, need a different starting place and don’t need the level of technical knowledge to understand a DTD. Thus, I built EADiva.

The name comes from a joke with one of my classmates as we corresponded about a paper on the subject. But it stuck in my head, evolving into the idea for this site. I don’t claim to be an EADiva, but I would like to evolve into one. If you would too, this site is here to help.