The State Archives has begun to make its finding aids available online. Both new and legacy finding aids are being encoded in EAD (Encoded Archival Description). EAD is a Data Type Definition of XML. We use the XML editor Notetab to tag the various components of a finding aid's text. EAD tagging focuses on content rather than presentation as HTML does. XSLT stylesheets used in the transformation of XML to HTML ensure the presentation of finding aids are in a consistent format. The initial posting consisted of almost 200 finding aids, 120 of which covered records for town governments. The State Archives plans to post additional finding aids on a monthly basis.

The finding aids are available from a link on the State Archives web page or at http://www.cslib.org/archives/FAIndexes.

Paul Baran, Government Archivist