Building lite-weight EAD repositories

University Archives and museums traditional haven't been viewed as a bastion for innovative technology development, but for a number of years now, it has been university archives and museums that have made the most significant moves towards adopting and utilizing XML-based metadata schemas for bibliographic description. Unlike the general library profession, which has been able to rely on MARC throughout the years as its primary vehicle for bibliographic description, museums and archives have traditionally had no formal metadata structure to create portable metadata records. It is likely that for this reason that museums and archives were quick to embrace EAD (Encoded Archival Description) as the defacto method for creating portable finding aids. However, while EAD has provided a vehicle for portability, institutions have found that actually using these finding aids within a database or for display can be quite daunting. Often times, individual institutions creating finding aids have no idea how to make use of them within their institution's current infrastructure - often relying on larger organizations like the California Digital Library or the Northwest Digital Archive (NWDA) to provide a vehicle for distributing their materials. And while the consortia method of distribution offers a number of benefits, it does come at a cost of individual institutional identity.Oregon State University currently is one of the participating libraries in the NWDA. This has been a tremendous relationship in terms of creating a resource that provides exposure to a wide number of collections at OSU in relation to other archive collections at other participating NWDA libraries. However, the cost has been a loss of identity in regards to how OSU presents its finding aids to its own user community. As a result, the OSU Archives was creating multiple finding aids - an EAD record for use within the NWDA and a static HTML page for use at OSU.In January 2005, OSU Valley Library started work on a lite-weight EAD repository with the following goals in mind: 1) that the solution be portable to other NWDA institutions, 2) be built on top of current open source technologies (like MySQL, PHP, etc.), 3) provided a method for federated searching of the repository and 4) that it be flexible enough to eventually include other metadata schemas. This lite-weight EAD repository is the first product of this development, which uses PHP, MySQL and Saxon to produce an easily replicable database environment for querying and serving EAD records on the web. Likewise, by building SRU functionality into the EAD repository - this lite-weight solution can also expose it's own resources to the outside world through a standard query and retrieval language.This poster session will discuss the method used to generate a lite-weight search and discovery solution and demonstrate the resulting finished product. This poster session will also discuss the implications of this type of repository solution - particularly the ability for institutions to quickly move EAD elements into a searchable, web-based environment as well as the ability for institutions to include their EAD repositories in a federated search infrastructure using a standard search and retrieval language.