Boxbuilder: EAD3 authoring for discovery system

Abstract

Boxbuilder is a web based open source tool that simplifies EAD3 authoring by leveraging the existing tools and technologies already available to an archivist. An archivist can use familiar tools like Microsoft Excel to catalog their records in non proprietary CSV (Comma Separated Value) format and use the Boxbuilder to generate the EAD3 xml file. Boxbuilder’s goal is to reduce the inherent complexity of EAD tags and to focus more on the discoverability of the finding aids. Hence, the template only uses 50 tags -- based on EAD3 template created by SAA's EAD3 roundtable in 2016 -- of the total 165 available tags in EAD3. The resulting simple EAD files can be easily crawled by Google, Summon or by any discovery system significantly increasing the visibility of archival resources. In the presentation Boxbuilder will be demonstrated.