OAC Best Practices Guidelines for Encoding New Finding Aids

January 10, 2001 Author: CDLCategories:

The CDL OAC Working Group (OACWG) subcommittee on Metadata Standards has recently developed and released two important documents: the OAC Best Practices Guidelines for Encoding New Finding Aids Draft 11/28/00 (BPG) and the Minimal Level OAC MARC Record for CDL Draft 12/12/00. The BPG is intended for use by contributors preparing new finding aids describing archival and manuscript collections for inclusion in the OAC. The purpose of the BPG is to ensure a base level of consistency in the content and structure of OAC finding aids, which will benefit both OAC users and OAC system designers. The Minimal OAC MARC Record document is intended for use by OAC participating repositories which have not typically created MARC bibliographic records for their archival materials and for the CDL Shared Cataloging Project.

Both of these documents are available at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/oac/.

The OACWG would appreciate your feedback on these documents. Please provide your comments and suggestions to Robin Chandler, OAC Manager (robin.chandler@ucop.edu) by January 31, 2001.