The Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards is pleased to release Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, Families (EAC-CPF) 2.0.
The process for a major revision for EAC-CPF started in 2017, following the 2015 merger of the Technical Subcommittees on EAD and EAC-CPF and the Schema Development Team into the Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards (TS-EAS) and was finalized in early 2022.
The main updates to the standard are
- changes to elements and attributes,
- relaxed data types,
- and modified encoding.
The EAC-CPF page provides details about the revision.
As part of the preparations for the release of EAC-CPF v2.0, the EAC-CPF Tag Library has undergone significant revisions and updating. These include clearer statements of the availability and repeatability of elements and their child elements, the addition of attribute usage statements, and greater consistency in descriptions. Examples of elements and attributes have been updated or added to demonstrate current EAC-CPF v2.0 encoding and, wherever possible, reflect real-world use cases.
Alongside the Tag Library, a Best Practice Guide has been developed. This is intended to complement the Tag Library and provide more in-depth explanations and examples of sets of elements and attributes being used together to fulfill a variety of use cases. The Best Practice Guide will continue to be developed and added to based on user community feedback and as use cases emerge.
In addition to the base EAC-CPF v2.0 schema, TS-EAS is also proud to release a new Schematron file that should be utilized for additional validations. In addition to providing validation tests that cannot be accomplished in the base schema, the new Schematron file can be utilized to ensure alignment with external codelists, such as the international standard of codes for the representation of names of scripts, ISO 15942, which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. For more details about Schematron, see the TS-EAS GitHub site.
Look for an announcement of a webinar about the revision in fall 2022.
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Glenn Gardner
Digital Projects Coordinator
Library of Congress
Greenbelt MD
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