The University of Michigan EAD (Encoded Archival Description) Finding Aids site provides World Wide Web access to finding aids or descriptive inventories for archival records and manuscript collections at the Bentley Historical Library. Over 725 Bentley Library finding aids are now available on-line. More finding aids will be added periodically.

• Search the Finding Aids
   Simple Searches
   Boolean Searches
• Browse the Finding Aids
   Browse All
• Finding aid help
• E-mail reference request

• About Finding Aids
• About the Bentley EAD Site
• EAD Home Page, Library of Congress
• EAD Help Pages

Introduction

The University of Michigan EAD Finding Aid Project is a collaboration between the Bentley Historical Library and the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) of the University Library, University of Michigan.

The finding aids are encoded using the EAD document type definition and stored as XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents, but are delivered to the user as HTML documents, converted on-the-fly from the XML, and thus can be read by standard web browsers such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. The underlying XML encoding and the HTML display allow the finding aids to be searched and delivered in structured parts, permitting the user to "unfold" and view as much of the finding aid as needed. It also permits several views of the finding aid; a "keyword in context" view, a standard view and a full text view, designed to give the user options in viewing and navigating the finding aids.

MIRLYN and the EAD Finding Aids Database.
All of the Bentley Library's archives and manuscript collections are listed in MIRLYN, the University of Michigan on-line catalog. The MIRLYN bibliographic record provides a short description of the collection with a limited number of subject headings. The finding aid for a collection generally provides a more detailed narrative description and a full listing of series and folder headings. The MIRLYN record includes a link to the on-line finding aid for the collection if one exists. Clicking on a link to a finding aid from within MIRLYN Web will open a new browser window to display the finding aid. To return to the MIRLYN search results close the browser window displaying the finding aid.

Documents On-Line
The only finding aids with links to documents are the James J. Duderstadt Papers , which provides direct access to some of the digital files in the Duderstadt Papers, and the Fyfe Family Papers, which contains a digital image and trascription of a Civil War letter. Several finding aids contain links to selected images which have been scanned as part of the Bentley Library Image Database.