The original question about "museum archives" is an interesting one, and I don't really know the answer, although I probably should since (a) I belong to the Society of American Archivists and (b) I work in something called an Archives Center within the National Museum of American History (Smithsonian Institution). However, my unit is not really a museum archives--it's more akin to a "special collections" area. We use MARC for our collections, unlike the rest of the museum. Our museum's archives--i.e., correspondence, official transactions (non-registrarial), and exhibition records--are part of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, which uses MARC format for cataloguing, as do most of the other "archival" repositories within the Smithsonian. Most of us in the archival community are either flirting with EAD or thinking of flirting with it. However, our museum accession and registrarial records are not part of any of these archival system--they're allied with the artifact collection cataloguing system, which is non-MARC. The Archives Center is the only unit in our museum which uses MARC for cataloguing, but our accession and registrarial records are in the separate museum cataloguing system, along with those of the "3-dimensional" artifact-collecting units. Archival collection catalog records, including mine, are part of the SIRIS system (at http://www.siris.si.edu), which can be viewed in the Archives and Manuscripts section. We have links from the SIRIS MARC records to some of our finding aids, which are HTML-coded. This means that information about Archives Center collections is in both the museum's general collection-tracking system as well as in the SIRIS archival database. Researchers who use SIRIS on the Web are sometimes confused about why they can find data about "flat" materials which often supplement the museum's artifacts, but not about the 3-dimensional objects themselves, but that's the way it is at the present. For example, you can find information about our collection of engineering drawings for Singer sewing machines, but not about the textiles collection's sewing machines. That's my situation, just for orientation, although it doesn't answer the question. What I really wanted to say was that I'm under the impression that few museum registrarial and accession records elsewhere are part of a museum "archives" either, and therefore probably do not use MARC and/or EAD. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong in my assumption! David Haberstich Archives Center National Museum of American History ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).