21st Century Finding Aids

Continuing on from the previous post, the second speaker on the "After the Revolution: Unleashing the Power of EAD" session panel was Max J. Evans. (I knew Max back when I was a young squirt just starting out, taking Jerry Ham's archives classes at UW-Madison.) His talk for this session was entitled "Finding Aids for the 21st Century: The Next Evolution," and he was full of good ideas.

Briefly, a few of his ideas are:

• a finding aid should be a surrogate for the collection
• it should contain a header that is always at the top of the inventory, so the user always knows what collection they are in, and the series and subseries should always appear
• allow users to view the subjects you've assigned as a list, or as a tag cloud
• allow users to click on the bulk dates and get a visual representation of the dates in the collection (akin to what Kramer-Smyth was doing, only for a single collection instead of many collections)
• scanning could become user-driven; as researchers ask for something to be scanned the digital image could be attached to the inventory
• as you click on file titles, a balloon with more information might pop up, or a balloon that lets the user request the box electronically or request a scan electronicallywould pop up
• scanned images would appear in a window within the finding aid.

Although Max claimed not to be a designer, his visuals were very effective, much more so than my attempts to describe what he was showing.