Tracing Johnson's Circle: Practical Experiments With EAC-CPF

Abstract

Interested in collaboratively exploring the potential of EAC-CPF, the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Houghton Library at Harvard embarked on a year-long project to gain experience with the new standard and, in the process, strengthen connections between disparate but deep holdings of lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) and his circle. The project team set out to document metadata best practices while developing and maintaining one set of records and to discover the practical limits and possibilities of rich content within the EAC-CPF context. This article outlines the project's challenges, lessons learned, and remaining questions.

KEYWORDS:

• EAC-CPF
• relations
• context
• collaboration
• best practices
• Samuel Johnson
• eighteenth century

Notes

¹ See http://www.loc.gov/ead/index.html

² TS-EAC on the SAA site available at http://www2.archivists.org/governance/handbook/section7/groups/Standards/TS-EAC-CPF

³ TS-EAD on the SAA site available at http://www2.archivists.org/governance/handbook/section7/groups/Standards/TS-EAD

⁴ Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC). (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, The California Digital Library and the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, 2010). Available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/index.html

⁵ See oXygen XML Editor, available at: http://www.oxygenxml.com/

⁶ Describing Archives: A Content Standard (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2004).

⁷ See https://www.ica-atom.org/

⁸ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition). Available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/

⁹ James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D: Comprehending an account of his studies and numerous works in chronological order  … : The whole exhibiting a view of literature and literary men in Great-Britain for near half a century during which he flourished (Vol. I), (London: Printed by Henry Baldwin for Charles Dilly, 1791), 32.