MARC to EAD or EAD to MARC

I just got an email from Martha McTear, Metadata Librarian for special collections at College of Charleston.  Turns out she is an WS alum from the class of 1997.  That’s 6 years before I got here, but it’s still pretty cool.  Martha asked about my cataloging strategy. Seemed like an easy post to just cut and paste my answer in a post. [You say lazy, I say efficient]

I would have to say I go from EAD to MARC.  It took me a few years to get the hang of going from being a librarian to being an archivist. [collections, not items] I start by having student workers do inventory input into Archivist’s Toolkit.  Eventually I get around to doing bio/history, scope and content notes and name/subject entries. Then AT spits it out and I put it on the Finding Aids web page. I then do a MARC record in Voyager that links to the finding aid, with minimal information.  We also have the library website set up now so that in the home page you can put a keyword search in the find box and choose archives on the drop down menu and it will search the web pages and finding aids as well as Voyager.  I believe most of our researchers, other than HWS students, find us through Google searches.