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About Finding Aids and EAD
What Are Finding Aids?
Finding aids are descriptive inventories, indexes, or guides that repositories create to describe and to provide access to the contents of manuscript collections or archival records. Finding aids usually include descriptions of personal papers or organizational records, inventories of contents, and other contextual information such as biographies or organizational histories. Finding Aids usually include more information about archival collections than what is available in Princeton's online catalog.
What is EAD?
EAD is a standard used to mark up (encode) finding aids that reflects the hierarchical nature of archival collections and that provides a structure for describing the whole of a collection, as well as its components. EAD is defined as a document type definition (DTD) that is compatible with both Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and extensible markup language (XML). EAD is intended to provide repositories with a means of establishing an effective, accessible, and stable presence for their holdings information. EAD accommodates variations in the length and content of finding aids within and among repositories, and preserves in electronic form the complex, hierarchically structured descriptive information found in archival repositories and registers, while also enabling the documents to be navigated and searched in ways that their printed counterparts cannot.
Princeton's Main Catalog and EAD Finding Aids
Most of the Library's archives and manuscript collections are listed in Princeton's Main Catalog (The University Library's on-line catalog). These bibliographic records provide a short description of the collection with a limited number of subject access points. The finding aid for a collection generally provides a more detailed narrative description and a full listing of series and folder titles. The catalog record includes a link to the on-line finding aid for the collection if one exists. Clicking on a link to a finding aid from within the Main Catalog will open a new browser window to display the finding aid. To return to the Main Catalog search results close the browser window displaying the finding aid. Clicking on a link in the "Subject Headings" section of a finding aid allows users to browse for similar items or collections within the Main Catalog.
Digital Images, Documents, and Records
At present, few finding aids include links to digital images of documents or records. In the future we hope to link finding aids to selected digital images. For more information about digital library projects at the University Library, please visit the Digital Collections website.