EAD3 Officially Adopted

Friends of EAD:

I am very happy to relay the news that EAD3 has been officially adopted as an approved standard of the Society of American Archivists.

After five years of work, the Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Description submitted EAD3 to the SAA Standards Committee at the end of June. After reviewing EAD3 and documentation of the revision process, the Standards Committee voted to recommend to SAA Council that it be adopted as an SAA standard. Last week SAA Council voted unanimously to accept that recommendation, making EAD3 official.

Some work remains to be done to package up a final release of the EAD3 schemas, but they will be made available prior to the SAA Annual Meeting in Cleveland. The EAD3 Tag Library will be available for sale at the annual meeting and online soon thereafter. Additional remaining work includes encoding the tag library in TEI so that it can be transformed to HTML and PDF, finishing the EAD 2002 to EAD3 migration style sheet, and updating the EAD website hosted by the Library of Congress. I will send out updates as the final work relating to EAD3 is completed.

I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to thank the members of TS-EAD and the Schema Development Team for their hard work throughout the revision process. It was a tremendous undertaking only made possible by their talent and dedication. Also crucial was the generous support of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, and OCLC Research.

Sincerely,

Mike Rush
TS-EAD Co-chair