There are currently 132 findingaids from three collections available for searching. These finding aids have been marked up in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) according to the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) markup schema.

The XML documents have been loaded into an Oracle database and indexed with Intermedia Text for searching within tags. If you click on "retrieve this findingaid" you will be taken to the HTML frameset dynamically generated from the XML version. Also available is a pointer to the concommitant static HTML-encoded text of the finding aid, which allows you to search within the findingaid. The third option is a printable non-frames version.

The Encoded Archival Description DTD is an open source markup standard that was developed at the University of California at Berkeley for delineating the structure of archival documents such as finding aids.

The original DTD used SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), but a lack of non-proprietary viewers has prompted a move to an XML version.

The tag names listed in the dropdown boxes in the search form (subject, corpname, geogname, and so on) represent some basic EAD access points into an archival document. For an elucidation of these tags follow this link.