Finding Aid Progress

Now that we've gotten several years worth of files back from the Troup County Archives and folks at the Digital Library have created DJVu derivative files, I was able to start checking the linking from the <daogrp> tags and to test the display of the finding aids. Given the size of the finding aid, I decide to create separate EAD instances for each record group.

• Superior Court (which is huge and will probably need to be split further for ease of use)
• Inferior Court
• Ordinary Court
• Justice of Peace Court
• County Court

To mark up the finding aid, I had used regular expressions in NoteTab light. It went fairly quickly. I've used the RLG Best Practices document as my mark-up bible (http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/past/ead/bpg.pdf). Having the derivative files helped me check to make sure my linking was working properly. The dao hrefs were pulled from info found in the finding aid

recordgroup#series#yearmonthfolder

So for Box 2, Folder 9/1830:6 from the Superior Court Record Group (i.e., record group 1) and Court Sessions series (i.e., series 5), my dao link (also to be my unique identifier for the DC records to be made later) would be

rg1se518300906

One of the issues that I did discover when linking was the issue of multiple folders representing a file unit. I'll need to add additional dao links within daogrp and tweak the stylesheet (a basic one DLG has employed for our other EAD projects, such as the Auburn Avenue Research Library's finding aids: http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/aafa/) a little to make them display in a way that makes more sense. (Currently the stylesheet calls each daoloc in a group a page.) I'm also thinking of a way to automate adding the multiple daos and how best to split up the behemoth that is the Supreme Court Sessions finding aid. I did pull out some of the extras from the finding aid (the glossary and list of Troup County officials) into separate html files.

My plan is to use a link checker each time we post new files to catch link issues. Once the finding aid is in a mostly finalized form (i.e., all linking is perfect), I'll run it through the date normalizer perl script written by Jason Casden at the Ohio State University, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute that is available through the tools page on the ead help pages (http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/ead/tools.html) and the RLG report card.