Welcome to the course page for Electronic Description of Archival Materials. My name is Elizabeth Dow, and I am the archives instructor at Louisiana State University. If you have any questions not answered on this page, please email me at edow1@lsu.edu.

In a world in which information resources anywhere are reachable from anywhere, libraries and other repositories of historical documents feel the pressure to share their holdings through Web publication of a surrogate record, an abstract, or the full text of the document.

Such publication can be as quick and dirty as “scan it and post it,” but truly useful and long-lasting contributions require a substantially more sophisticated approach. Web publication in a manner that will stand the test of time requires an understanding of document analysis and open metadata standards with which to represent the results of the analysis, e.g., MARC or XML DTDs, etc. This class will translate the knowledge of paper-based description standards taught in an introductory course to an electronic format. Each student will work with at least two documents and go through the process of electronically describing each in several ways. The work in the class requires a fair amount of reading, but the real proof of knowledge comes from the hands-on activities required.

By the end of the class, the student will be able to

1. Create a valid and well-formed XML document
2. Create a CSS style sheet with which to display the XML document
3. Analyze both an archival finding aid and an historical letter for XML markup with an appropriate DTD
4. Markup an archival finding aid using EAD and an historical letter using the MEP extension of TEI.
5. Create a good Level I MARC record for each document compliant with current standards of data content and format as defined by Hensen's APPM, including a full complement of subject terms legal in LCSH and the AAT.
6. Discuss a variety of issues that arise in publishing historical documents on the Web.

As you can see, the class emphasizes doing XML markup and MARC record creation. Therefore, all enrolled students must demonstrate a basic understanding of HTML by completing a brief encoding exercise. Click here for the test document, which explains everything you must do. You must complete this exercise before the first day of class.

Click here for an older syllabus; I will update it, but this will give you the flavor of the course and workload.