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Abstract
An exploratory study was designed to gain a perspective on the current state of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) metadata use and quality. This article examines the implementation of EAD metadata at 6 digital archival repositories. It identifies EAD metadata elements that evince the most frequent inconsistent and incomplete usage. For this, the header <eadheader> areas of a collection of 150 randomly collected EAD metadata records were analyzed in terms of frequency, completeness, and consistency. In addition to these criteria, 3 best practices guidelines for EAD were consulted to determine how EAD metadata tags are used in local repositories vis-à-vis the guidelines. Analysis focuses on patterns of usage of certain aspects of EAD metadata within each repository as well as comparison across all 6 repositories. Implications and issues drawn from the evaluation are also discussed in relation to the issue of semantic interoperability across EAD digital repositories.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study is partially supported through an early career development research award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. We would like to express our appreciation to the reviewers for their invaluable comments. Our appreciation also goes to Caimei Lu and Guisu Li for their help on data collection and analysis.