NCEAD Technical Working Group -- Home

North Carolina Encoded Archival Description (NCEAD) is a working group within NC ECHO that examines the implementation of EAD for North Carolina institutions and provides best practice guidelines, tools, assistance, and other resources. The overall goal of NCEAD is to encourage standardization throughout encoded archival finding aids in order to enable inter-institutional searching of cultural heritage materials. Membership is open to any interested North Carolina
cultural institution.

North Carolina Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Project Technical Working Group

The Technical Working Group will be responsible for the maintenance and revision of a standard EAD template that can be customized and used by each institution to create the EAD documents for the web. This would require preparing new XSL style-sheets and maintaining and revising existing style-sheets after taking into account new metadata schemas and standards. If mass changes become necessary in existing encoded documents, this group would decide on the use of scripting to effect the changes. The group would also explore new avenues like search engines and XML indexing and make recommendations about the right approach to adopt on these. Once a solution has been agreed upon, this group would work towards its implementation and provide adequate technical know-how wherever necessary. The working group will review software applications and make recommendations.

Composition: Membership in the TWG is open. Anyone interested in participating should express interest to the Chair. Chairs will be appointed by the Executive Committee and if not a member, will be non-voting members of that body.

Chair: vacancy. If you are interested in serving the NCEAD community as Chair of the Technical Working Group, please contact Kathy Wisser, NC ECHO Metadata Coordinator

North Carolina ECHO, Exploring Cultural Heritage Online, http://www.ncecho.org, is the World Wide Web doorway to the special collections of North Carolina's libraries, archives, museums, and historic sites.

The NC ECHO project is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the federal Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.

This innovative and collaborative project seeks to build a statewide framework for digitization in order to facilitate deep, wide, and comprehensive access to the holdings of North Carolina's cultural institutions. NC ECHO is co-sponsored by Duke University Libraries and the State Library of North Carolina.

Questions and comments may be directed to the NC ECHO staff. [mail to: ncecho@ncmail.net]