The economics of a cooperative EAD project

Abstract

Retrospective conversion is a costly endeavor, especially when the quality of description utilized during the mark-up process is insufficient according to data content standards. When retrospective conversion is implemented in a cooperative project, the problems are compounded. Administrators and encoders alike are forced to reckon with legacy data formats and descriptive styles that do not match those utilized in their own archival practices. More time and financial expenditures must often be placed on administrative duties in order to deal with the lack of standardization. Discusses effort to mitigate the high cost of cooperative projects, focusing on the author's experience in analyzing costs while implementing a cooperative Encoded Archival Description (EAD) project as an archivist working in the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics.

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