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.
A standard for encoding finding aids will ensure not only broad based access to our cultural heritage and natural history collections, but that the findings aids themselves will survive hardware and software platform changes, and thereby remain available for future generations. The Project involves two interrelated activities. The first task entails the design and creation of a prototype encoding standard for finding aids. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are developing 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. The design and development team is analyzing the structure and function of representative finding aids.