Finding Aids now available in CSV and XML

This was exciting news to me---apologies if it's known to everyone else!---that came up at Amanda Strauss and Amy Benson's THATCamp session last weekend.

It's now possible to download finding aids in CSV format:

You can then open the file in Excel (or Refine, or whatever you like). Each "item" is given a unique identifier. You can add your own notes, search & reconfigure the items (e.g. to group all of the correspondence included in the finding aid in one list), etc, etc.

Amy was asking what features might be helpful to researchers and it sounds like she's planning to get started on some of the requests soon.

The fact that you're going from an EAD XML "tree" structure to a flat "table" structure creates a few quirks; someone suggested created Excel Macros to help clean up the conversion and make it more readable.

(You can also view the finding aid's XML directly by plugging the Finding Aid ID into the following string: http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/ead2002/schema/ID E.g., if the Abbott Family Civil War letters finding aid durable url is http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.Hough:hou00213, then the ID is hou00213 and the xml view is http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/ead2002/schema/hou00213)

Another researcher was interested in being able to download all of OASIS in CSV format, to quickly and easily search across all finding aids. (Much as we all love the plodding camel...)

Yet another option already available to researchers is to upload the csvs to Dataverse, a platform that permits commenting and versioning. This would allow researchers to crowdsource notes, transcriptions, photos, etc tagged to the official information about that particular folder or archive.

Amanda Strauss (from Schlesinger) has been working with the csvs a lot, so if you're interested in learning more she'd be a good person to ask.