ABSTRACT
The strategy for conversion to electronic cataloguing of western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library has been to a large extent determined by circumstances-the size and variety of the manuscript collections, the existence of detailed published catalogues for the earlier collections, the availability of funds for specific purposes, and, above all, by the increasing demand of scholars worldwide for online catalogues. From 1996, we began to investigate options for the conversion of our catalogues to electronic form. We were advised to look at EAD by the New Media Librarian in the Bodleian. It soon became apparent that EAD provided the flexibility needed to handle the great variety of manuscripts in the Library’s collections. It also seemed to be sustainable and relatively cheap to implement, and excellent documentation was available from the United States. The adoption of EAD as the cataloguing system in Western Manuscripts was largely driven by the funds made available for retrospective conversion through the Research Libraries Group. This diverted our main efforts away from current cataloguing initially. However, the need to analyze our existing catalogues to provide instructions for data converters has had an enormous impact on current 56cataloguing practice in our department. Our choice of EAD for our electronic catalogues has been vindicated by its increasing use worldwide, and the numerous opportunities that have arisen for cooperative ventures founded on the use of EAD. Contributing to the Archives Hub in the United Kingdom has enabled us to create the first ever overview of the Bodleian’s western manuscript collections. We are now also contributing our first detailed EAD catalogue to the Access to Archives (A2A) database. The adoption of EAD for cataloguing medieval manuscripts was unusual, but has created the essential building block for the extension of these descriptions using other XML schema now being adopted by cataloguers of medieval manuscripts. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <https://www.HaworthPress.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
