The Berkeley Finding Aid Project is a collaborative endeavor to test the feasibility and desirability of developing an encoding standard for archive, museum, and library finding aids. Finding aids are documents used to describe, control, and provide access to collections of related materials. In the hierarchical structure of collection-level information access and navigation, finding aids reside between bibliographic records and the primary source materials.
Bibliographic records lead to finding aids, and finding aids lead to primary source materials.
The Project will involve two interrelated activities. The first task will be to create a prototype encoding standard for finding aids. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley will develop the encoding standard in collaboration with leading experts in collection cataloging and processing, text encoding, system design, network communication, authority control, and text retrieval and navigation. Project participants will analyze the structure and function of representative finding aids. The basic elements occurring in finding aids will be isolated and their logical interrelationships defined.