Record Keeping

The ArchiveGrid discovery system is made up in part of an aggregation of EAD (Encoded Archival Description) encoded finding aids from hundreds of contributing institutions. In creating the ArchiveGrid discovery interface, the OCLC Research project team has long wrestled with what we can reasonably do with the large (120,000+) corpus of EAD documents. This paper presents an analysis of the EAD documents (the largest analysis of EAD documents to date). The analysis is paired with an evaluation of how well the documents support various aspects of online discovery.

The AIMS project, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, represents a co-operative strategy among four partner institutions, to energize collection development in the area of born-digital papers, and to empower librarians and archivists in the management of born-digital assets. The four partners in the project led by the University of Virginia are Stanford University, University of Hull and Yale University.
Although the project is now finished, many useful resources are still cited.