The Ismar David archive: An Electronic finding aid
Susan Colodny, David Pankow, Sandra Markham, Colodny, Susan (Contributor)
Ismar David ( 1910 1996) was a German-born graphic artist who launched his professional career in Jerusalem and moved in 19C2 to live and work in the United States. He is noted for his brilliant work in Hebrew and Latin calligraphy, lettering, and type design, as well as a distinctive linear style of illustration. Over a span of six decades, Ismar David amassed an archive of materials that chronicles his design career. In 1997, the archive was donated to the Melbert B. Cary Jr. Graphic Arts Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where it will be preserved and made available for research. To facilitate the use of an archival collection for research, a repository pre pares what is called a finding aid. A finding aid traditionally provides a detailed description of the collection contents and organizes the materials in a coherent and systematic way. In addition, a finding aid often explains a collection's origin, gives relevant biographical information, and notes the scope and content of a collection. Parts of a collection are usually listed with container numbers that are used to identify and request items for examination. In recent years libraries and other archival repositories have begun to "publish" electronic finding aids on the World Wide Web to help researchers learn the exact content of a collection from a remote location and avoid the travel and detective work that was accepted as part of the research process prior to the explosive growth of the Internet. Many text-encoding options exist and are currently used to create electronic finding aids, including American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and Portable Document Format (PDF) . EAD and PDF offer the best solutions for publishing finding aids online considering the need to convey hierarchical structure. Any practical choice of technology, however, should consider institutional programmatic decisions, th
Downloadable Archival Material, Undefined, 2000-05-01T07:00:00Z