The EAD Cookbook: A Survey and Usability Study

While EAD has been warmly embraced by larger archives and libraries, smaller institutions have hesitated to implement the standard. The EAD Cookbook was developed to encourage such acceptance. But does it provide an adequate tool to meet the archival profession's descriptive needs? This paper addresses the question by reporting the results of a survey of Cookbook users, reviewing literature related to the usability of archival on-line resources, and evaluating the usability and retrievability of EAD finding aids created by institutions responding to the survey. It includes specific usability recommendations and concludes with a recommended approach for further work to simplify EAD encoding and improve display.