E(g)AD!

It started as a localized outbreak. People who had previously seemed hale and hearty suddenly became ill, usually with terrible results. Part of the problem with containing the outbreak came from the curious practices in the disposition of the departed’s effects, where traditional methods were deemed dangerous and needed to be wiped out to prevent the spread the virus. Soon, the problem became global.

No, we are not talking about the Ebola outbreak; we are instead referring to the widespread threat of Information Science that archivists have dubbed "EAD," (which stands for "Endlessly Aggravating Drudgery.") This descriptive format for the online presentation of archival inventories was foisted on an unsuspecting profession about twenty years ago, and while it has recently shown signs of its impending demise, Encoded Archival Description is still plaguing pusillanimous parchment processors in manuscript repositories around the planet. But, like all things digital, the EAD format is beginning to show its age. In a medium where mayflies outlive most software applications, the same Information Scientists who developed EAD are now casting about for the next digital hula-hoop. Item level description, the painstaking burden of creating online tools to give the illusion of research to the "right now" generation, will soon eclipse any attempt to enforce a new standard of inventory display designed with hopelessly arcane language and procedures.

The problem with these electronic fads is not the time wasted in conforming to standards that will not last as long as a Larry King marriage. The real crime is the ever changing medium in which these tools are set. Like embossing a piece of Jello, these same inventories and search machines will only be temporary as Information Scientists invent new vexing ways to format them. Not content with one method, they will invent a dozen more, ever while insisting that we catalog individual pieces of paper. In that way lies madness, and archivists need to draw a line in the sand if they expect to process any meaningful amount of paper backlog in the future.