Mcn2008

I've had my hands full lately. Two weeks ago I was at the MCN conference (wherein, among other things, I have continued my dominion as Archduke of Archival Description by taking over the MCN Standards SIG chair position from The Bancroft Library's Mary Elings), and next week I'm off to Philadelphia for the PACSCL Something New for Something Old conference. I hammered out the coherent, written version of my paper I gave at EAD@10. I prepared a proposal for next February's code4lib conference in Providence (ahem, vote for mine, if you're so inclined):

Building on Galen Charlton's investigations into distributed version control systems for metadata management, I offer a prototype system for managing archival finding aids in EAD (Encoded Archival Description). My prototype relies on distributed version control to help archivists maintain transparency in their work and uses post-commit hooks to initiate indexing and publishing processes. In addition, this prototype can be generalized for any XML-based metadata schema.