Taking the Long Way Around the Hog Barn

Suppose you had a well trained truffle hog that could find those delicious tubers without fail, and that this hog performed the task so easily that chefs simply follow him around to collect bushels of truffles. This system has worked so well that chefs have been buying truffles from you for decades, using them to create culinary masterpieces that fetch top dollar, pleasing the palate and the pocketbook.

Now suppose someone came along and told you they had a cat to sniff out truffles. The cat, a very special and expensive breed, takes an awful long time to train, but the results are similar; chefs are still getting their truffles, and they like finding the tubers because (lets face it) cats are so much cuter than hogs. But a problem arises. After a while you notice that you are not getting as many truffles. The cat takes longer to cover the same ground, and the training curve is so steep that you must spend months teaching it to distinguish between catnip and truffles. In fact, so many truffles are still left in the ground while your cat takes its own sweet time to find a handful that the backlog grows, and grows, and grows.

Archival collections are not truffles, but Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is a trained cat that has been foisted on to our profession that is leaving plenty of tubers rotting away on our back shelves. Where once our efficient composition of finding aids resulted in timely produced inventories discoverable through any search engine, we now take days to do what used to be performed in hours. The result is a mountain of paper that may never be addressed until it has dissolved into an acidic mass of lignin dust.

What is the reason for this knavery we call EAD? Is it a vast conspiracy on the part of the Information Scientists to send us down the road of obsolescence already filled with the plodding masses of librarians? Or is it a new method to insure domination by doges of digital dukedoms dedicated to dissimulation of documents and thereby establish a high priesthood of practitioners perpetuating their predominance? Either way, historians suffer, researchers remain unaware of unprocessed collections, and many are the unwritten scholarly volumes on a variety of historical subjects. Here at True Archives we think that is the real goal; the fewer books produced, the less hassle for the biblioposers charged to shelve them.