ownership. Archivists refer to the entire body or records of an individual or organization as its fonds; the fonds is thus a conceptual whole that reflects the process of the production or accumulation of records that share a common function or activity and exhibit a natural unity. A fonds may contain anywhere from one item to millions of items, and may consist in any form, including manuscripts, charts, drawings, maps, audio, video or electronic records. Because published materials differ in significant and fundamental ways from the collections of interrelated and unique materials found in archives, there are significant differences in bibliographic and archival description. A bibliographic description represents an individual published item, is based on and derived from the physical item, and is thus considered item-level. Archival description, by contrast, represents a collection, or a fonds, often containing individual items of various media, sharing a common origin, or provenance. The description of archival materials, therefore, involves a complex hierarchical and progressive analysis. It begins by describing the whole, then moves down to subcomponents; the description frequently does not extend to the item level. In this way archival description focuses on the intellectual structure and content of the collection rather than its physical characteristics. A finding aid is a tool that helps users to find materials within an archive through the description of its contents. Most findings aids provide similar types of information, including, at a minimum, a title that connects the finding aid to the creator of the collection; a summary of the material contained in the finding aid; background and context of the collection, including major figures involved; and information about the custody of the collection as well as any conditions or restrictions regarding its use. The unique nature of archival records and the geographic distribution of individual collections has presented a challenge for those wishing to locate and access them for over 150 years. With the advent of international networked computing and online catalogs, however, the potential emerged for making archival collections searchable online. History EAD originated at the 1993 Society of American Archivists annual meeting in New Orleans and was headed by Daniel Pitti at the University of California, Berkeley. The project's goal was to create a data standard for describing archives, similar to the MARC standards for describing bibliographic materials. The initial EAD Version 1.0 was released in the fall of 1998. Such a standard enables