mead

Metadata from Encoded Archival Description.

The core of this code is an identifier which expresses the location of an object in a physical collection. This identifier can be used as a filename for digitized objects during scanning. Later descriptive metadata from EAD XML can be extracted. This descriptive metadata can then be applied to stub records for each digital object, which can quickly make digitized objects as discoverable as the archival description makes the physical collections.

Functionality

Parse EAD XML and output all identifiers (with other metadata) for all the component parts. This export can be CSV or JSON.
Resolve a filename-identifier to a location in the physical collection and extract related metadata up through the hierarchy
Create barcodes based on an identifiers.
Validate whether an identifier is well-formed and valid by resolving to a component part in the EAD XML.
Commandline tools for each of these functions.

Installation

gem install mead

To enable barcode generation you’ll need to install rmagick and the version of gbarcode specified in the Gemfile.

Commandline use

automead --help

automead --mead mc00240-001-ff0052-000-001 --baseurl http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/findingaids --ruby

ead2meads --url http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/findingaids/mc00240.xml

Identifier specification in brief

These identifiers encode information about where original objects in the physical collection are located. To make this work for as wide a range of encoded EAD XML and archival arrangement and processing practice as we could, it includes many pieces of information to help insure uniqueness within a collection.

Identifiers are made up of 6 possible segments. Segments are separated by a single dash - to aid in readability. Take the sample identifier mc00240-001-ff0001-000-001_0001

mc00240: Collection number. The first section identifies the collection and is usually the eadid of the collection. mc00240 refers to www.lib.ncsu.edu/findingaids/mc00240
001: Series number. This is the number of the series of which the physical item is a part. It is a three digit, left zero padded number.
ff0001: Container code & number. The third segment is made up of a two letter code for different container types. The list of current codes can be seen in lib/mead.rb as Mead::CONTAINER_MAPPING. (These are the codes NCSU uses for encoding containers in EAD XML.) The second part is a three digit, left zero padded number. This example would be flatfolder 1.
000: Folder number. In this case there is no second container, so the folder number is 000. If there was a container with the “folder” value for the type attribute and text content of “3”, then this segment would be 003. In the case where the value is other than “folder” the container code is used in front. So a “mapcase” container could be “mc003” when the map case is the third map case in the parent container.
001: Item number. This is the number of the item in the container. It is an arbitrary incremented number. Multiple pages of multipage document would be considered as one item and so would get the same item number.
_0001: Sequence number (optional). If there is a multipage document then this section can be used. This is the sequence or page number. It is preceded with an underscore.

TODO

Refactor, refactor, refactor.
Test for use by other institutions. I’m happy to help make this code work for the needs of other institutions.
Get more examples for more tests.
Better exceptions.

Author

Jason Ronallo