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Archives and library technology resources available on the Internet

SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)

Starting points

Readings and surfing for the Harvard University EAD Workshop.
Library of Congress Encoded Archival Description. The EAD is the SGML DTD (Document Type Declaration) for finding aids currently in use by archivists around the world. The LC page includes links to a history of the EAD, marked-up finding aids, and other EAD information.
SAA's EAD Roundtable EAD Help Pages has links to all of the tools and information you need to get started.
University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, David's Seaman's About SGML lists useful links to information about both SGML and EAD.
University of California, Berkeley Library Berkeley Finding Aid Project includes descriptions and histories of the project, which is the "birth place" of the FINDAID DTD, precursor to the EAD.

Archives using EAD

Note: some sites offer their finding aids in SGML (rather than translating them to HTML). Looking at SGML files requires having an SGML viewer (e.g. Panorama) associated with your HTML browser; at this point none of those viewers work on Macintosh computers. Macintosh users can, however, download raw SGML files by clicking on such links. Sites that require an SGML viewer usually include links to the free viewing software; this software can be difficult to configure.

Harvard University OASIS information pages include guidelines for using EAD and a history of the project, while OASIS is the search engine that provides access to the finding aids.
EAD Finding Aids at Library of Congress has links to finding aids in SGML from the departments at LC using EAD.
The Virginia Heritage Virtual Archive Project at the University of Virginia Library is a collaborative project. The site includes searches based on the EAD encoding, and finding aids delivered in HTML.
Iowa Women's Archives has a number of finding aids marked up in HTML or SGML.
University of Durham Library has a DynaWeb server that converts EAD-encoded handlists to HTML on the fly, and includes search capabilities.
University of Vermont's collection inventories are also presented in HTML via Inso's DynaWeb, and searchable.
University of Michigan EAD Interface: Version 0.9b1 offers boolean searching.
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive has an SGML-based search engine for collection guides and produces HTML on the fly, or allows you to see the raw EAD-encoded guides.
Yale University Library EAD Finding Aids Project database of SGML encoded finding aids includes pages that allow you to construct searches of the database.
Duke University, Special Collections Library, includes finding aids encoded in SGML and HTML. EAD at Duke University includes the Duke EAD template.
University of California, Berkeley, Finding Aids for Archival Collections has examples of SGML and HTML marked up finding aids, most using either FINDAID or the alpha version of the EAD.

EAD components

Version 1 EAD DTD files (ead.dtd, eadsgml.dec, eadgrp.dtd, eadtable.ent, eadchars.ent, eadnotat.ent, eadbase.ent) are available for ftp at the Library of Congress. See the instructions on the version 1 page. Helper files for Author/Editor, WordPerfect, and SGML/XML authoring products are available on the EAD cookbook page.
EAD Tag Library for Version 1.0
EAD Application Guidelines
EAD Help Pages, maintained by the EAD Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists, are an excellent source of assistance for beginners as well as people with more experience using EAD.

General information about SGML

A Gentle Introduction to SGML, which is Chapter Two of the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3).
SGML on the Web
The SGML/XML Web Page
Other professions using SGML:
- Electronic Text Library, at the University of Virginia, includes texts housed in SGML and converted to HTML. Note the search techniques available.
- Humanities Text Initiative, University of Michigan, a project to create and maintain online texts.

Related standards

XML. This new standard will allow us to forgo preparing stylesheets that will only interpret SGML for display in proprietary viewers. Instead, we would write a stylesheet to accompany the SGML file as it's viewed by a standard web browser. For more info, see Commonly Asked Questions about the Extensible Markup Language.

Software and vendors

The XML Cover Pages links to a lot of useful information about SGML and XML as well as to many applications for parsing, formatting, editing, etc.
Open Text is a powerful text database that several institutions are using to house and search SGML encoded finding aids.
Inso Corporation makes grants to educational institutions for their DynaTag/DynaText/DynaWeb product, which includes indexing, searching and web server software that converts other SGML DTDs to HTML on the fly, but not authoring software.
The free Panorama viewer, which can only be used with a web browser on a PC, enables you to navigate SGML-encoded finding aids.

MARC and other stuff

Technical information about the MARC format. This is a database format used by libraries and archives, usually for online public access catalogs (OPACs).
The Public-Access Computer Systems Review has lots of interesting articles about library technology, indexed in a number of different ways.
Z39.50 is a protocol that allows people using one database to search another database using the first database's query language, over the Internet. The Library of Congress Z39.50 pointer page includes links to a number of library catalogs using Z39.50. Further down the same page is LC's general information about Z39.50.

Digital libraries

The National Digital Library Federation is figuring out what will be required to bring together digitized material about the U.S. This page includes links to NDLF's member institutions' projects.
Preserving Digital Information: Final Report and Recommendations, by the Commission on Preservation and Access's (CPA) and the Research Library Group's (RLG) joint Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information.

Museums

Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information. CIMI's current major project (Cultural Heritage Information Online) includes using z39.50 to share information among museums.
Museum Computer Network. Among MCN's current special interest groups (SIGs) is MUS-EAD, a group testing implementation of the EAD in museums.

Image databases

Harvard University's Archives, Libraries, and Museums have joined to form a union catalog of visual material at the university called VIA, or Visual Information Access. Background information about the project, including the fields that comprise the database, is also available.
The Getty Information Institute sponsors a useful Introduction to Imaging, which includes a bibliography.
The Clearinghouse of Image Databases and IMAGELIB listserv archives is a good place to find technical descriptions for projects all over the world, as well as links to some web-based projects.