integrating digital objects with EAD

I spent the day on the Whitworth College campus, attending a Northwest Digital Archives planning meeting. One clear development direction for the NWDA is improved digital object integration with EAD. Digital object linking from finding aids is currently supported through the dao/daogrp-related EAD elements, as described in the NWDA Best Practices. However, applications such as Archon (which I've posted on in the past) support digital content integration within the application. (A good example of Archon in action is the UIUC instance. Note the distinction between collection results and digital content results.) A more advanced application supporting EAD and digital object integration is the California Digital Library's XTF.

I will be investigating the EAD-digital content development path in the context of the project's locally-developed search/retrieval/presentation application and the core IXIASOFT TEXTML database.