Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is a standard for encoding descriptive information regarding archival records. Overview Archival records differ from the items in a library collection because they are unique, usually unpublished and unavailable elsewhere, and because they exist as part of a collection that unifies them. For these reasons, archival description involves a hierarchical and progressive analysis that emphasizes the intellectual structure and content of the collection and does not always extend to the level of individual items within it. Following the development of technologies in the middle to late 1980s that enabled the descriptive encoding of machine-readable findings, it became possible to consider the development of digital finding aids for archives. Work on an encoding standard for archival description began in 1992 at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1998 the first version of EAD was released. A second version was released in 2002, and the latest version, EAD3, was released in August 2015. The Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress are jointly responsible for the maintenance and development of EAD. EAD is now used around the world by archives, libraries, museums, national libraries and historical societies. Through a standardized system for encoding the descriptions of archival finding aids, EAD allows users to locate primary sources that are geographically remote. At its highest level, an EAD finding aid includes control information about the description as well as a description of the collection itself. EAD3 was revised in 2018 to address concerns relating to the ease of access to archival descriptions and its ability to interface with other systems. Background and need Archives by their very nature are different from libraries. While libraries contain individual items, such as books and journals, of which multiple, identical copies exist, archives contain records that are both unique and interrelated. Archives represent the activities of a person, family or organization that are created and accumulated naturally in the course of their ordinary activities. In contrast to the items in a library, therefore, all the items in an archival collection share a relationship. The entire body of the records of an organization, family or individual have been created and accumulated as a byproduct of the organization or individual’s existence, and therefore share a common origin, which is referred to by archivists as its provenance; provenance refers to both the origin of an item or collection as well as its custody and