Supported Content Types in OAC

OAC hosts three major types of digital content:

  • EAD and supplemental PDF collection guides
  • MARC collection guide and item-level records
  • METS digital objects

Content in OAC conforms to the following criteria:

  • Collection guides encoded using the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard should conform to the OAC Best Practice Guidelines for EAD.
  • Collection guides or item-level records encoded using the MARC21 format should conform to the UC Bibliographic Standards for Cooperative, Vendor, and Campus Backlog Cataloging [PDF] (Appendix B, "Collection Level Records"). We utilize the MARC Leader 07 field to differentiate between collection guides vs. item-level records, within the context of the OAC display.
  • Collection guides and digital objects are assigned persistent identifiers according to a naming scheme called the Archival Resource Key (ARK), to ensure long-term public access. The ARK scheme was developed at the National Library of Medicine and is currently in production use at the CDL.

The XTF Platform Underlying OAC

OAC is based on a CDL-developed XML- and XSLT-based delivery platform, packaged as the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF). The XTF system contains Java Servlets and tools that permit users to perform Web-based searching and retrieval of electronic documents. It utilizes Lucene indexing technology and XSLT stylesheets for generating displays.

XTF supports the search and delivery of collections that is user-friendly, flexible, and viable for the long term. XML provides a means by which the structure and meaning of a document can be specified by "tags". For example, the title of this document is:

Metadata for all objects in the repository -- regardless of format -- are mapped to the Dublin Core element set for generalizability and to support cross-collection discovery.

Collection Guide Search and Delivery in OAC

OAC uses XTF for search and delivery of EAD collection guides and MARC records. Text searches target the full text of the documents.

EAD is an encoding standard for preserving the hierarchy and designating the content of collection guides to archival holdings worldwide. It enables Internet delivery of these collection guides and also ensures their permanence by providing a stable, non-proprietary encoding format, which is maintained by the Society of American Archivists. In technical terms, EAD comprises a Document Type Definition (DTD) for encoding collection guides that is written following the syntactic rules of the SGML and XML markup languages.