Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Level Down To Level Up: The Impact Of Item-Level Description On Finding Aid Discoverability, Paul Daybell, Andrea Payant, Becky Skeen, Liz Woolcott

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

Utah State University Libraries Cataloging and Metadata Services unit investigated the discoverability of local Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids using different levels of description. The research team created two nearly identical versions of the same finding aid for five collections and posted them online. The only difference in the finding aids was the level to which the collection contents were described. For each collection, one version of the finding aid was described at the file (box or folder) level and the other version was described at the item level. Over a year later the team pulled the analytics for …