Documentation
Best Practices Guidelines
Among the goals of the project was to provide documentation to other institutions looking for solutions in enhancing access to their own collections. To this effect, Best Practices Guidelines have been developed to describe the use of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) XML for numismatics in the context of the U.Va. Art Museum's own collection of Roman and Greek coins and the website developed to publish the collection online.
It is important to note that some of the methods of encoding are very specific to the design of this particular website and the underlying server environment with the Apache applications, Cocoon and SOLR. Modifications to the XML encoding methodology (e. g., naming schemes for id attributes and XML files) may be desired for other server environments based on infrastructural differences such as different XSLT stylesheets, use of Ruby/Perl/PHP for transformation, and different search indices.
The Best Practices Guidelines for the University of Virginia Numismatic Collection were written between October and December of 2008. For elements and attributes not addressed--but allowed--in the guidelines, please refer to the Encoded Archival Description information site maintained by the Library of Congress for proper usage.
Link to University of Virginia Numismatic Collection Best Practices Guidelines
Crosswalks
In order to illustrate EAD's versatility in describe coins and other types of museum objects, a series of crosswalks will be developed to and from the EAD-for-coins scheme. This includes a table with mappings from EAD to NUDS, VRA-Core, and Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA). XSLT stylesheets mapping EAD to and from the other metadata formats will be added eventually.
Current list of crosswalks
CAA 2009 Presentation
This project will be the topic of discussion at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference held this year in Williamsburg in late March (2009). A PDF of the presentation is available.