Tales from the shoulders of giants: Collaborative implementation of encoded archival description at the University of Minnesota Libraries

Since the late 1990s, few case studies on implementation of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) have appeared in the literature. How has or hasn't the landscape changed? This article reports on the experience of EAD planning and implementation at the University of Minnesota Libraries and suggests that though many of the lessons learned by early implementers still hold true, some of the challenges have changed; the body of experience and tools developed by early implementers have greatly eased the technical tasks of encoding and display of EAD finding aids. The article also attempts to provide much needed statistical data on the average time required to produce an EAD finding aid.