Review #8: Dennis Meissner on finding aid implementation for EAD

In his 1997 article for American Archivist, Dennis Meissner presents a compelling argument for caution regarding legacy data when converting to a new standard. He discusses the Minnesota Historical Society’s situation when they were faced with converting to EAD and how they took advantage of the situation to become even more customer-focused than before.
Meissner explains how in the process of converting their finding-aids to EAD the MHS was faced with two problems. First, they discovered that many of the elements in their legacy finding-aids did not fit nicely into the EAD logical organization of those elements. He cites the situation with the identifier number, which the MHS originally treated as a string of numbers at the bottom of every finding-aid page. Secondly, they discovered that the actual structure of their finding-aids were woefully difficult to understand as they relied on archival expertise and jargon to create them. Rather than simply convert these problematic finding-aids into EAD and forget about them, Meissner and his colleagues took the opportunity presented them to "reengineer" their finding-aids, hence the name of the article as "First things first: reengineering finding-aids for implementation of EAD."

For Meissner, the primary problem with the traditional finding-aids is the bias inherent in serving users of the physical archives while EAD finding-aids are meant to serve remote users as well as those patrons who actually visit the archives. With the traditional finding-aid any problems of understanding that a user had could be remedied through user education and while this had been attempted to be transmitted to the Web there was very little evidence that this was actually successful. With the conversion to EAD, the MHS decided to make the finding-aids more transparent and readable so that a remote user could quickly retrieve the information he or she needed from the document on the computer screen.

In order to do this, the MHS adopted a customer-centered approach to the creation of the finding-aid that prefigured the traditional archivist-centered approach. With this as their vision, Meissner and his colleagues proceeded to utilize the structure of the EAD document to create an HTML page from the EAD records that would allow the remote user as well as the physically present patron to quickly read and interpret the finding-aids. Foremost, they presented the information from the general (name of the institution and logo) to the specific (item level descriptions for the collection being described in the finding-aid with the administrative information tightly packed into a single part of the document).

Meissner presents an argument that EAD conversion provided the impetus for making cleaner, more transparent finding-aids and he implies that without this conversion such an exercise (onerous as it was) would not have been pursued. This article presents a useful message to metadata specialists to always keep in mind that the ultimate goal of metadata is the output and that before creating new metadata records it is important to have a vision of what one wants to present to the user through that metadata and most importantly how that new output is going to aid the user in his or search for information.