Warning to my non-archives readers! More than perhaps any other industry (except for computer technology) librarians and archivists love acronyms, initials, and alphabet soup.
What is EAC-CPF and why do we care? Encoded Archival Context- Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families is Encoded Archival Description (EAD) on steroids. It takes the regular finding aids, keeps (most of) the standards we all know and love, and then dives deeper. I started hearing about EAC-CPF last spring in Kathy Wisser's Archival Access and Use class. Kathy is one of the people working with an international group to develop EAC-CPF (their last meeting was three days in Italy. Poor them.) so she is very excited about the concept. And by the end of the workshop I think the rest of us were almost as excited by the idea as she is.
What's the excitement about? Here's an example. While I was interning at the Massachusetts Historical Society I processed a collection of bound volumes collected by Frederick Lewis Gay. He collected a lot of Massachusetts historical items including several ledgers from a man named Knight, who recorded the amount of fish caught in the area each day (more complicated than this actually and I'd give you the link to the finding aid, but MHS hasn't activated it yet). I discovered several other of his ledgers made it to an archive in Newfoundland, and I'm sure there are more I didn't discover in other collections across the East Coast. So if you want to research Knight and cod fishing, how do you know about all the places holding his ledgers? What if you want to find out about the man and his family? Before EAC-CPF you'd have to go to every possible archive, historical society, town hall records office, college, etc. that could reasonably be expected to have an interest in a collection like that and hope you got lucky. The internet might make it easier, but you'd still worry you'd missed something and halfway through your thesis you'd be going insane, asking random squirrels why the archives didn't all talk to each other just enough to have a list of all the places you could find different collections that connected to Knight. With the implementation of EAC-CPF, you would no longer have to rant at innocent wildlife like a lunatic (although depending on your thesis, I guess you still might do some ranting). You could go to one record on Knight, or cod fishing ledgers, or a few other access points, and there he'd be: with connections to people and places he lived and worked, family members who might also have archival collections, other people who kept cod ledgers, etc. You could be reasonably sure you now had a comprehensive list of all the places you needed to go to actually look at the ledgers and plan your research trips accordingly. Your sanity would be saved, your thesis would rewrite views on cod fishing on the East Coast, and you'd win a Pulitzer Prize. Or get a cod named after you. It's a small example for an encoding project that can also turn Corporate Bodies and Families into something more manageable to archivists and researchers alike, but you can see why it's exciting.
And the possibilities keep going. Although she didn't go into it too much in our workshop, I've heard Kathy give other talks on EAC-CPF and discuss the idea that you could also encode relationships between people, families, and corporations: linking one person to any number of others through different relationships they had. Married this person, worked for that person, attended the execution of another person (although that relationship seems a little one sided to me). Kathy says she's counted over 800 different sorts of relationships you might want to explore. She was even asked recently about the encoded relationship between Dr. Samuel Johnson and his cat, Hodge. Is the cat a Corporate Body or a Person? Everyone agreed Hodge was a Person, in case you were wondering.
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| London, England: Statue of Hodge, Dr. Johnson's famous cat |
Yes, some of this may be a little too detailed. Maybe Johnson's cat doesn't need his own record since Hodge probably didn't leave any writings behind for archivists to collect (although I did find a poem about Hodge and Johnson written by Percival Stockdale for my cat loving friends). The implementation of EAC-CPF may still be out of reach for all institutions, some of which can't even afford to implement EAD let alone encode EAC-CPF for their backlogs. But I think this is the archival future, gearing up in the present to make our professional lives both easier and more time consuming. Most archivists I know are at least a little obsessive compulsive about details. The more the merrier. They want to be able to tell researchers all the places to find what they need when they need it. Cooperation, not competition is becoming more and more the name of the game. It's a concept we're talking about in the small museum world as well as the archival world, as something that might be worth looking into. I'm sure the outside point of view is, what took you so long?
The future is now and it's name is EAC-CPF.
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