Our poster “Metadata for Archives” is a summary of our LIS653 Knowledge Organization group project. We focused on three main topics – Common Issues of Implementing Metadata in Archives, Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and Social Networks and Archival Content (SNAC). In our presentation we offered a detailed review of our findings to complement this summary.

In the first section, general principles of metadata are described, along with a review of some practical issues of implementing metadata standards in archives.

The second section is entirely devoted to EAD, briefly explaining its principles and structure. The main stages of EAD development are reviewed, from its first release in 1998 till the latest version released in 2015. Finally, there is a critical review of strengths and weaknesses that archivists face in the process of implementing EAD.

The third section describes core principles of SNAC, with a brief history of the project’s development, its aims, and the main principles SNAC is based on.