A Proposal to Create a Union Database of
Encoded Archival Description Finding Aids to
Collections in Eleven Virginia Repositories

Project Summary

Founded in 1994, VIVA consists of the libraries of the thirty-nine state-assisted colleges and universities within Virginia, and an additional twenty-nine independent, not-for-profit educational institutions. VIVA's mission is to provide, in an equitable, cooperative and cost-effective manner, enhanced access to library and information resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia's research libraries serving the higher education community. The Virginia Heritage Project will initially draw on collections held by the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, George Mason University, the Library of Virginia, Old Dominion University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the Virginia Historical Society, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, the Virginia Military Institute, Virginia State University, and Washington and Lee University.

The Virginia Heritage Project has two primary goals. The first goal is the creation of a large union database of EAD tagged finding aids (approximately 17,500 pages) to archival collections in Virginia. The second goal is the development and implementation of a model for statewide dissemination of and training in newly emerging library standards and technologies. Traditionally, the principal means of accessing the collections at these repositories has been to travel to each repository and page through a variety of highly specific and idiosyncratic paper finding aids. The union database will allow users worldwide to search standardized finding aids from all participating institutions in a seamless, integrated fashion. Thus, from their desktops, users may discover new links among physically-distant collections. Scholars have expressed great enthusiasm for this project. The database will also be a valuable resource for elementary and secondary school teachers and their students. Virginia's newly-adopted Standards of Learning (URL: http://www.pen.k12.va.us/go/Sols/history.html) mandate that all Virginia high school students will develop skills for historical analysis, including the ability to analyze documents, records, and data. The Virginia Heritage Project will establish its EAD processing center at the University of Virginia, which will provide the technological leadership for the project. As the first phase of the project, the processing center will encode and provide online access to approximately 7,500 pages of finding aids representing more than 500 collections on African-American history and culture and are drawn from all eleven participating institutions. In addition, the processing center will encode 5,000 related pages drawn from the Virginiana collections of the University of Virginia; the Virginiana collections are not only valuable in their own right, but also are rich in resources that will help to place the African-American materials in context.

Concurrent with the first phase of the project, the processing center at the University of Virginia will provide extensive training and support to the other ten participating VIVA institutions. Five institutions will begin their own in-house processing of EAD finding aids during the first year of the project and the other five will begin in-house processing during the second year. By the end of the two-year period, these additional processing centers will contribute an additional 5,000 pages (for a project total of 17,500 pages) of EAD-encoded finding aids for other Virginiana collections to the Virginia Heritage Project's union database. Each of the participating institutions will in turn begin to provide training and support in EAD processing and conversion to other nearby members of VIVA. At the conclusion of the project, a minimum of twenty-two archivists, librarians and staff across Virginia will be proficient in the use and application of EAD. The Virginia Heritage Project, like other statewide projects, will establish a central unit for the conversion of finding aids to EAD, but extends the emerging model developed in these projects with its ambitious focus on the dissemination and decentralization of EAD processing during the period of the grant.