The speaker will discuss the past, present, and future of major archival standards, focusing on EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context - corporate bodies, persons, and families). EAD focuses on the description of archival resources, while EAC-CPF provides a formal method for recording the description of record creators. The presentation will focus in particular on the design of "post- finding aid" archival description systems, describing both the environment within which archival description is created and maintained and the possible published forms of the description that can be searched, rendered, and enhanced by users.

Daniel Pitti is the Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/) at the University of Virginia.