For those of you out there that use CONTENTdm — OSU has been starting to experiement with putting EAD records into CONTENTdm and utilizing the software as our temporary (maybe longterm temporary) solution to making EAD records available electronically to our patrons. As CONTENTdm 4.0 users know, this version offers the ability to index many of the access point fields in the EAD finding aid. This allows you to import an EAD record into CONTENTdm, but when you see how its rendered…well, its sad. So, I’ve been having some fun hacking the NWDA’s ead stylesheet to make it compatible with CONTENTdm, and it really wasn’t all the difficult. So, I thought I’d let folks have a peek at what we are doing. I’ve placed one finding aid in a sample collection that utilizes the generated stylesheet. The image can be found at: Guide to Alice Kidder Evans Photographic Collection. The transformation process has been setup so that you can either push the processing to your patrons browser (using the built-in XML objects found in all current generation browsers) or can be handled server side using SAXON (or whatever XSLT processor you might have). It was surprisingly simple to make this work — and once I get this finished, I’ll make sure I post the docs to the CONTENTdm user area (and this blog) so that folks can try this out at their own sites as well.
–Terry