Multi-institutional EAD: The University of Virginia's Role in the American Heritage Project

In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a joint grant to the University of California at Berkeley, Duke University, Stanford University, and the University of Virginia to produce a body of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids and to test the assumption that a collection of such guides could function both as a local resource and as a multi-institutional union database. This paper concentrates on the issues of workflow and on-line delivery for the University of Virginia guides, which employ Web forms for data creation, on-line searching, and "on the fly" conversion to HTML.