Collections include literary and personal papers as well as records of government agencies covering a wide variety of topics. Continued growth is expected with the addition of 3,000 FA in the next month. Still there is variety in EAD implementation and Anne hopes the publication of the EAD Guidelines will provide more consistency and standardization. One major problem was that institutions were not consistent in the way they encode the name of their repository. RLG has compensated for this by determining which fields might contain this information and then searching all of them.
Repositories also use a variety of date formats, making searching by date difficult.
Next speaker was Tom O Brien of Apex Data Services a data conversion company. Since then the company has worked with over 37 institutions. Out of 144 available tags, RLG and Apex identified 73 tags that would comprise an RLG minimum markup standard. Tom also addressed whether a third party vendor should add intellectual markup or whether the repository should do that. Tom advised the RT to decide on an EAD structure and tags, analyze legacy data, identify existing structure and begin mapping their FA to the EAD structure.