RecordEXPRESS is a freebie tool that you can use to quickly and easily publish information about your collections, in the form of an EAD collection guide. You can access RecordEXPRESS through your OAC Dashboard.

  • Create a collection-level guide: You can use RecordEXPRESS to create a collection guide that includes collection-level description, such as collection title, collection description, extent, access information, and other collection-level information. RecordEXPRESS will directly publish this information to the OAC; any updates will display in the OAC the next day.
  • Attach supplemental PDF files: You can attach supplemental PDF files to your EAD collection guides, in cases where you have longer collection inventories and other descriptive information that is not encoded in EAD. For an example of what this looks like, check out the "Additional Collection Guides" links at: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8mc9617/ 
    • Full-text searchable PDFs: Any supplemental PDFs you attach to an EAD file will also be full-text searchable within the OAC—meaning they will appear in OAC search results when users hit on any words within. This only applies to PDFs that have “embedded text,” for example those that have been generated from Word documents or have been scanned using OCR. Simple images of the document in PDF format will not be indexed and therefore will not be searchable.
    • Not sure if your PDF has "embedded text"? Open the file in a PDF reader. If you can copy and paste text to another document, or conduct a search using CTRL + F, it should be searchable in the OAC.
    • You may attach one or more PDFs to the collection guide. The PDF files will display in list-format, and the display order of the PDF files will be designated by the filename, arranged in alpha-numeric order. 
    • Click "Update Record" to publish changes: Please note that once you complete the upload process, you will also need to click the "Update Record" button to push the changes to the OAC website.
    • [Note about previewing PDFs: When previewing the finding aid from RecordEXPRESS, please note that links to any attached PDFs will not resolve to the actual files; the links will resolve correctly once the guide is online in the OAC, and viewed from the OAC website.]
  • Link to "online items" or digital collections: Moreover, you can also place a link in the guide, pointing to digital versions of the collection items (that are on your local CONTENTdm website, etc.) -- this shows up as an "Online items" link at the top of the guide. Here's an example of a RecordEXPRESS guide, with the link: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9199s3rs/

Please note that RecordEXPRESS is a simple webform tool that supports publication of collection-level details and description. RecordEXPRESS does not support component-level inventories and hierarchical description.

For more information on how to use RecordEXPRESS, check out our user guide.

Quick Tutorial


Need to remove a RecordEXPRESS finding aid? Please contact us.

Need to replace a RecordEXPRESS finding aid with a new EAD record, please review these recommendations.