Looking Beyond the Archive: Utilizing Encoded Archival Context in a Broader Societal Context

Abstract

The eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) has produced EAC-CPF XML outputs from web resources for many years. Using the Find & Connect web resource project as a case study, this article explores the uses that the ESRC has developed for EAC-CPF data, including online presentation of descriptive contextual information, as the basis of online search services, as a system-independent and preservable copy of research datasets, and as a harvestable data source for interoperability with other datasets. Also covered are expanded uses of the EAC-CPF schema for describing a wider range of contextual entities beyond corporate bodies, persons and families.

TheEncyclopedia of Australian Science: a virtual meeting of archives and libraries*

“…After the nLA's investigation into the most suitable standard for harvesting metadata about people and organisations into the new service they were developing, it was decided that the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) XML schema was the most suitable (dewhurst, 2008). The Bright Sparcs data -by this time integrated with Australian Science at Work -was one of the first resources to be harvested into Trove in 2010 (McCarthy, Smith, & Jones, 2015). This meant that the EOAS data were now able to be connected more broadly to other resources at a national level, moving beyond the history of science field to become part of national information infrastructure.…”