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. The DTD will then be developed based on the results of this analysis. Toward a Finding Aid Encoding Standard. The result of this project, if widely adopted, will be to turn our legacies into our heritage.
Legacies are a form of inheritance in that they are personal and singular.
LCHS, and the MARC format, will continue to have a use in providing brief abstracts of groups of records for researchers. They serve, in this way, as a guide to the inventories. Recent developments in adding hyper-text links to MARC fields has demonstrated that it is possible to provide immediate jumps from the descriptive abstract to the more comprehensive inventory. Access to the inventory is the key to making use of the heritage information archivists have compiled about documents. A heritage is a community based foundation for the future.