The economics of a cooperative EAD project
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830110411934 |
| Date | 01 December 2001 |
| Published date | 01 December 2001 |
| Pages | 400-407 |
| Author | Clay Redding |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The economics of a
cooperative EAD project
Clay Redding
Introduction
As an archivist working in the Center for
History of Physics (the center) at the American
Institute of Physics (AIP), I help our
organization fulfill its mission to preserve and
make known the history of modern physics and
allied fields for researchers around the world. In
order to fulfill this mission, the center rarely ± if
ever ± acquires new bodies of records for its
own holdings. Instead, the center usually serves
as an intermediate third party that assists
repositories and individuals alike by finding
homes for records. Over the years, this
approach has allowed us to develop strong
working relationships with numerous
institutions. These relationships have helped us
promote and utilize cooperative approaches in
developing new projects.
A key tool in fulfilling our mission has been
the International Catalog of Sources for History
of Physics and Allied Sciences (ICOS), which
serves as the center's bibliographic database.
The ICOS describes primary source collections,
and serves as a tool for researchers to locate
collections from US and international
repositories. In order to keep the ICOS up to
date, we rely on the cooperation of other
archival repositories to obtain information
about recently accessioned bodies of records.
As an effort continually to offer new tools to
historians of science, the center realized that a
collection of finding aids encoded in EAD
would be an asset to researchers.
In late 1999, the center obtained a grant from
the National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH) Division of Preservation and Access to
develop and maintain a shared union database
of history of science finding aids in cooperation
with the following institutions: California
Institute of Technology, Harvard University,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Northwestern University, Rice University,
University of Alaska-Fairbanks, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of
Iowa and University of Texas at Austin. The
Center requested $78,381 from NEH, and
designated $106,495 for cost sharing, totaling
$184,876.
The original work plan called for existing
center staff to contribute a total effort of 1.6
full-time equivalent (FTE) staff members. A
The author
Clay Redding is the Automation/Systems Archivist at the
American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland, USA.
E-mail: credding@aip.org
Keywords
Economics, Archives, Co-operation, Systems management,
Project finance
Abstract
Retrospective conversion is a costly endeavor, especially
when the quality of description utilized during the mark-up
process is insufficient according to data content standards.
When retrospective conversion is implemented in a
cooperative project, the problems are compounded. Admin-
istrators and encoders alike are forced to reckon with legacy
data formats and descriptive styles that do not match those
utilized in their own archival practices. Often, more time and
financial expenditures must be placed on administrative
duties in order to deal with the lack of standardization.
Efforts to mitigate the high cost of cooperative projects are
discussed.
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Volume 19 .Number 4 .2001 .pp. 400±407
#MCB University Press .ISSN 0737-8831
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