New EAD site on web for museum collections

From owner-ead@loc.gov Fri May 23 05:48:27 1997
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 19:32:32 -0800
From: Richard Rinehart <rinehart@UCLINK2.BERKELEY.EDU>
Subject: new EAD site on web for museum collections

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Hi,

The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive at theUniversity of California
has re-launched our website.  One major change has been the addition of several
searchable resources of film documentation (12,000 curatorial film notes
encoded in SGML) and EAD-encoded guides to our art collection.

The main page is: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
and the EAD collection guides specifically are available under:
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/search/collectionguides.html.

The means we use for delivery of all the SGML data (including the EAD
guides) online is to have them be searchable in both fielded and
relevance-ranked full-text searches, and then convert the SGML file (or
chunks of it) to HTML on the fly for viewing in standard web browsers. We
also got around the problem of having large container lists without having
to split them up into smaller chunks  in the markup for delivery (it
happens on delivery instead as you get the first 6 records, then the next
6, etc).

We do not have many of these collection guides up yet (two) but we
concentrated first on getting the infrastructure working and on fleshing
out each guide by including all the images (for one) and annotated records,
linked full-text of some papers, and a searchable image surrogate of an
entire artists book (for the other). We'll have more art and film EAD
guides up soon.

I'd be very grateful to get any feedback on the way this stuff is
presented, how it is to navigate, etc. For instance, we liked the EAD for
it's ability to represent the heirarchies so important to describing the
multi-part works of one conceptual artist, so we reflected that heirarchy
in the way the records appear on screen, grouped together first by title of
the larger work, then underneath by medium of the components, then
individual records.

Anyway, it's been great to listen in on this list, since I learned a lot
which enabled us to do this, and of course relied on the knowledge of
Daniel Pitti when he was still on campus. Thanks,



Richard Rinehart              | Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
Systems Manager & Education   | University of California
Technology Specialist         | 2625 Durant, Berkeley, CA 94720-2250
rinehart@uclink2.berkeley.edu | http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
& Board of Directors, Museum Computer Network, http://world.std.com/~mcn/