Effective access to digital assets: An XML-based EAD search system

This paper focuses on the question of effective access methods, by developing novel search tools that will be crucial on the massive scale of digital asset repositories. We illustrate concretely why XML matters in digital curation by describing an implementation of a baseline digital asset search system that is fully XML-driven. The system aims to provide better access to archival material through digital finding aids in the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard. Relevant (parts of) archival descriptions within often lengthy and complexly organized digital archival finding aids can be found faster and with more ease. A succinct walk-through of the process of design and implementation of such a system is given, from a higher-level conceptual and generic view, where we start from the actual digital archival finding aid to the eventual delivery of the fonds to the user. Beyond this baseline, we propose a method for automatically providing extra archival context through automatic link detection between archival finding aids. We relate our efforts with the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) initiative.