Using the open archives initiative protocols with EAD

The Open Archives Initiative Protocols present a promising opportunity to make metadata about archives, manuscript collections, and cultural heritage resources easier to locate and search. However, several technical barriers must be overcome before useful OAI records can be produced from the disparate metadata formats used to describe these resources. This paper examines Encoded Archival Description (EAD) as a test case of the issues to be addressed in transforming cultural heritage metadata to OAI. While EAD and OAI may appear to be incompatible, a mapping would be both useful and technically feasible. The authors suggest that it will be necessary to create numerous OAI records from one EAD file. In addition, the findings indicate that further standardization of EAD markup practices would enhance interoperability.