Encoded Archival Description

An Encoded Archival Description is a standardized, structured document, often referred to as a finding aid , for describing archival collections, such as the personal papers of noteworthy individuals. Finding aids are inventories, indexes, or guides that are created by archival and manuscript repositories to provide information about specific collections. While the finding aids may vary somewhat in style, their common purpose is to provide detailed description of the content and intellectual organization of collections of archival materials. The first EAD specification was based on SGML and was released in an alpha version in February 1996. The DTD was converted to XML in 1998. Schemas in XML Schema Language and RNG (Relax NG) were released for an updated EAD specification, published in 2002. EAD's developers incorporated significant concepts from the international descriptive framework provided by the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G) and from national descriptive content standards such as the Canadian Rules for Archival Description (RAD).