The American Heritage Virtual Archive Project a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Duke University, and the University of Virginia is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Project is creating a shared database of EAD-encoded finding aids describing and providing access to collections documenting American history and culture.

The primary goal of this project will be the development of a demonstration system, which will also provide a test bed to evaluate both the effectiveness of the prototype's "virtual archive" in providing access to distributed digital library resources, and the feasibility of the decentralized production methods of the project. To achieve its goal, the project will explore intellectual, political, technical, and economic concerns.

• Intellectual
  Project participants will look at potential finding aid content standards necessary for finding aids from diverse institutions to coexist harmoniously in the same database. They will also develop mechanisms to link and integrate related collections contributed by different institutions so that they can be navigated as part of a single virtual collection. For example, the University of Virginia and Berkeley will explore ways to integrate their separate collections of Mark Twain letters. The project will investigate hypertext mechanisms for linking and navigating both within individual collections and across intellectually-related collections.
• Political
  Participants will develop policies and procedures for local creation and maintenance of collection-level catalog records and finding aids that will ensure consistent metadata that can be successfully integrated into the virtual archive. Authority over and management of the virtual archive will be systematically reviewed. Potential problems associated with data ownership and responsibility will be explored. Training, user support, and documentation needs will be studied.
• Technical
  Participants will explore technical issues of access, description, and control that arise when finding aids for collections with related subject material from different institutions are combined and used in the same database. Participants will also study various methods for creation and maintenance of finding aids to be made available in a remote central database. Collaborating institutions will also experiment with different software than that used at Berkeley, in order to help separate, by comparison and contrast, application-related issues from encoding and intellectual-content issues.
• Economic
  Participants will continue the study of finding aid conversion costs begun in the Berkeley Finding Aid Project. They will also investigate costs of data input and database maintenance, staff training and documentation, and system maintenance, including equipment renewal, database refreshing and migration, and telecommunications. The economic aspects of this demonstration project will be as important as the intellectual, political, and technical questions; the cost-effectiveness of the finding aid model will be a key factor in its long-term acceptability as a strategy for creating large-scale digital libraries of primary resources.

During the week of November 11, 1996, representatives from Stanford, Virginia, Duke, and Berkeley met in Berkeley to plan the project. The central objective of this meeting was to arrive at an "acceptable range of uniform practice" in the application of EAD to the conversion of existing finding aids from each of the participating institutions. This effort used local policy and procedure developed at Berkeley as a starting point, and with a minimum of controversy arrived at preliminary agreement on uniform practice for the project.

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