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National Library of Medicine online manuscript finding aids 

This notice is being distributed to several listserves. Please forgive 
multiple postings.

The National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine Division 
announces its plunge into the EAD pool.

Encoded Archival Description (EAD), an SGML document type definition, 
is a recently developed standard for presenting archival finding aids 
on the World Wide Web. The standard is jointly maintained by the 
Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of 
Congress and by the Society of American Archivists.

For the initial public release, thirteen of the Archives and Modern 
Manuscripts Program's 104 finding aids were selected for web 
publication. All 104 finding aids have been encoded in SGML according 
to the EAD Document Type Definition and will then be exported to HTML 
for web publication.

The finding aids currently available include collections of John Shaw 
Billings, C. Everett Koop, James A. Shannon, the National League for 
Nursing, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation Awards, the American 
Association for Medical Systems and Informatics, the William and 
Wilkins copyright suit against NLM, and "Profiles in Science" 
collections of Nobel Laureates Christian Anfinsen, Julius Axelrod, 
Oswald T Avery, and Martin Rodbell.

Within the next few weeks, the remaining manuscript collection finding 
aids will be added to the site, in weekly installments.

John Rees, Assistant Curator of Manuscripts, was the principal on this 
project. The NLM's Lister Hill Center for Biomedical Communications 
provided additional assistance. The Electronic Scriptorium of Leesburg, 
VA, performed the retrospective conversion. Paul Theerman, Head of 
Non-Books Collections, participated in the determination of the subset 
of EAD that we decided to use in HMD. James Labosier, Manuscripts 
Technician, will assist with final HTML editing of the remaining 
finding aids. Special thanks goes to Michael Fox of the Minnesota 
Historical Society for his help with adapting one of the EAD Cookbook's 
XSL stylesheets for HMD's use.

Access to the finding aids is through the HMD home page under "General 
Information" then "Manuscript Collections Sorted by Type" and then 
"Manuscript Collections Sorted by Call Number." If an electronic 
finding aid exists, it will be noted in the right-most column. An 
alphabetical list of available finding aids also exists.

HMD Home Page:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/hmd.html

Direct access:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/manuscripts/msc.html 
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/manuscripts/alpha.html

Future access points will include a hot-link from the MARC record in 
the NLM's online catalog LocatorPlus.

For any technical questions about HMD's local conversion or encoding 
processes, feel free to call or e-mail John Rees directly.

John P. Rees
Assistant Curator, Modern Manuscripts
History of Medicine Division
National Library of Medicine
301-496-8953 Office
301-402-7034 Fax
reesj@mail.nlm.nih.gov
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