So in the last post I discussed in brief, EAD and XML. ArchivesSpace makes XML EAD documents by exporting the completed finding aid and selecting the XML coding format. There were a few surprises along the way.
When I exported the EAD for the Clarence G. Campbell Collection, I saw the EAD element tags selected. As Tom explained to me, you always have to run an XML document through an editor program ti validate the coding. This ensures that other machines can read the document and that the document can be translated into a web document so that web browsers can access the document. For this task, Tom selected Oxygen Editor (more information on Oxygen Editor's validation component).
While running the Clarence Campbell finding aid through Oxygen, we found that certain parts of the document were not recognized by the validation process. The interesting part was that the tags marked invalid were system generated IDs. These IDs are alphanumeric character strings. When the string began with a number, it was marked invalid; when the string began with a letter, it passed validation.
To check if this could be a bug in the ArchivesSpace system, we decided to contact the help desk and see if anyone else noticed this bug or if we did something wrong. Either way, the simple solution for the moment was to alter the system generated IDs.
Stay tuned for the results of the help desk email.
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