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).