Serving Up EAD: An Exploratory Study on the Deployment and Utilization of Encoded Archival Description Finding Aids

This study explores the current methods for deploying EAD (Encoded Archival Description) finding aids to identify the most promising practices being used, examines how much and what type of evaluation archivists are gathering from end-users regarding deployment methods, identifies archivists' perceptions regarding the use of EAD-encoded finding aids, and in general, attempts to further the study of electronic access to archival collections. The focus of this paper is the current state of deployment methods for EAD, including how long and what types of deployment methods are being used, why they were selected, what changes, if any, are being planned, and what types of challenges are associated with them. The paper also focuses on archivists' perception of end-user utilization of EAD and explores the evaluation upon which this perception is based, including how and on what basis archivists formulate their perceptions.