</c01> </dsc> Citing EAD There have been some studies about how to cite EAD files with variable granularity. In particular, Buneman and Silvello proposed a rule-based system to automatically create citation snippets to be used as references when citing XML data; a case study is based on EAD. Furthermore, Silvello proposed a framework, which learning from examples, automatically creates references at a different level of coarseness for XML files. This framework has been tested on the Library of Congress collection of EAD files. Criticism A user study analyzing the user interaction patterns with finding aids highlighted that "[they] focus on rules for description rather than on facilitating access to and use of the materials they list and describe", and that many archive users have serious issues using finding aids. Common and frequent user interaction patterns with finding aids are navigational and thus they require to browse the archival hierarchy to make sense of the archival data. Some critics claim that EAD constrains researcher interaction because several operations are either impossible or inefficient. For example, it is problematic to: let the user access a specific item on-the-fly, since it requires defining fixed access points to the archival hierarchy; let the user reconstruct the context of an item without browsing the whole archival hierarchy; present the user with only selected items from an archive, since the finding aid presents a given collection as a whole. Furthermore, EAD allows for several degrees of freedom in tagging practice, which may turn out to be problematic in the automatic processing of EAD files, since it is difficult to know in advance how an institution will use the hierarchical elements. It has been underlined that only EAD files meeting stringent best practice guidelines are shareable and searchable. See also Encoded Archival Context (EAC) Metadata Metadata standards Extensible Markup Language (XML) References External links ArchiveGrid EAD official home page at the Library of Congress (tag library, links to schema and DTD, etc.) EAD schema and other files for download via GitHub RLG Best Practices Guidelines for Encoded Archival Description Society of American Archivists SAA Encoded Archival Standards Section 1998 introductions Archival science ISO standards Markup languages Technical communication Metadata standards