Encoded Archival Description (EAD)

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is a nonproprietary XML standard for marking up the finding aids that archivists create to describe collections of records. Maintained by the archival community, it captures both the multilevel structure of a collection (from the whole fonds down to series, files, and items) and its descriptive context, such as creator, provenance, scope, and arrangement. EAD matters in recordkeeping because it turns a once-paper or word-processed finding aid into machine-readable data that can be harvested, indexed, and presented consistently across repositories, improving discoverability and long-term reuse of the description itself. It encodes the description, not the records, so it complements content and preservation standards rather than replacing them. For example, an archive transferring a manuscript collection might publish an EAD finding aid whose nested elements mirror the physical arrangement, letting a researcher navigate from the collection summary to a specific folder. EAD aligns with descriptive practices like provenance-based arrangement and pairs naturally with collection-level metadata and accession records.