Using the LC EAD Schema

As part of the OASIS retirement, Harvard will no longer support a locally developed EAD schema. As of July 2018, we will be validating against the Library of Congress EAD schema. In order to make the transition, we need to make changes to our finding aids. Please note: In June 2020 the Library of Congress changed their website URL from http to https. Earlier versions of finding aids will have the old LC EAD schema link and this link will need to be update in order for finding aids to open automatically.

Here are the steps to follow:

Open you finding aid in Notepad or Wordpad (right click on the document and select program from the “open with” option)
Identify this opening line of tagging “<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>” and hit return after the end angle bracket
Identify this piece of tagging “<eadheader” and insert a return BEFORE it
Taking care not to delete any of the surrounding lines of tag, replace the tagging between the two above identified lines with this tagging:

The tagging you are replacing will look something like one of the following:

<ead xmlns="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9 http://www.loc.gov/ead/ead.xsd"> (contains old URL to Library of Congress)

5. Save your document

6. Open the document in XMetaL to make sure the document is still valid. If the finding aid won’t open or is invalid, ask Paula or Johanna for help

Additionally, please do the following:

Replace any locally saved versions of the template you have with the one found here: G:\SCHLES\COLLECTION SERVICES\MANUSCRIPTS\XML\ArchivesSpace
Replace any locally saved versions of the schema you may with the version found here: G:\SCHLES\COLLECTION SERVICES\MANUSCRIPTS\XML\new 2009 schema\LCXlink schema. I’ve updated the processing manual instructions for browsing for a schema in the adding addenda to existing MC numbers section to reflect the change.