CALM records into Encoded Archival Description (EAD)

I am working on getting our catalogue data ready for export from our archival management system CALM. We are using the Archives Hub EAD 2000 report which exists in CALM. The following fields are now in in our collection level record:

Language “Eng”

Creator Name “Mass Observation Archive”

EHFD publisher “University of Sussex Library”

Country Code “GB”

Origination “Mass Observation”

Repository Code “181”

Guidelines for required fields and common problems with the EAD report are available from the Archives Hub here. For the future, we will need to add these fields to all our collection level records to make them EAD ready.

A quirk with this transfer to EAD is that it is a report, not an export so you cannot highlight a selection of records (called a hitlist in CALM). The Mass Observation Archive is over 23,000 records and is causing CALM to freeze. Very quick and helpful advice from the CALM helpdesk led us to turn off the server and then run the report which seems to work. This method is less good for the rest of the Special Collections staff in the office who need to use CALM and our users who access it through the web interface, so I am rationing my EAD tests to less busy times.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 12:11 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “CALM records into Encoded Archival Description (EAD)”

  1. Jane Stevenson says:
    March 7, 2011 at 17:31

    It might be worth saying that we have created an updated specification for the export, which is currently with Axiell and being implemented. There are some problems with the older export – problems you can get round, but it requires more editing.

    When you say that you cannot highlight a selection of records, do you mean its all records or one at a time? I can see that might be a problem!

  2. Karen Watson says:
    March 9, 2011 at 09:17

    Hi Jane

    The Mass Observation Archive is in 5 parts and I thought it would be useful to export in parts so we could have a rolling program of tidying up the records and exporting to EAD. CALM can only “report” on a collection so separating into parts is not possible.
    Tidying up the catalogue records has been really useful – we discovered that Conscientious Objectors is abbrieviated to COs, so lots of records would not come up in the search for “Conscientious Objectors”.