Encoded Archival Standards: Best Practice Guide

The Encoded Archival Standards: Best Practice Guide is a resource that describes and provides explanations and examples of complex encodings and concepts in Encoded Archival Context - Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF) and Encoded Archival Description (EAD).

Created and maintained by the Society of American Archivists, Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards (TS-EAS), the guide is intended to be a growing resource that will be built on and developed over time based on user community feedback and as use cases emerge.

The Best Practice Guide will complement the existing EAC-CPF and EAD Tag Libraries. While the Tag Libraries describe each element and attribute individually, the Best Practice Guide provides more in-depth explanations of sets of elements and attributes being used together to fulfill a variety of use cases. These are accompanied by best practice examples for different use cases, where possible based on real usage, to clarify the encoding. For detailed information about individual elements and attributes, see the EAC-CPF Tag Library or the EAD Tag Library.

EAC-CPF is based on the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (ISAAR-CPF). Revisions to the EAD and EAC-CPF standards are being undertaken by the Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards (TS-EAS) based on the requirements of the Society of American Archivists’ standards maintenance schedule and policies, and are not tied to ongoing development of standards by the ICA, though keeping close connections to the ICA Experts Group on Archival Description as a related standards body. For this reason, the EAC-CPF 2.0 continues to be based on ISAAR(CPF) rather than the draft versions of Records in Contexts. We anticipate that future versions of EAC-CPF and other standards maintained by TS-EAS will take the Records in Contexts - Conceptual Model into account once it is finalized and approved.

TS-EAS welcomes contributions and feedback from users of the standards it manages.