Next steps for EAC-CPF

EAC-CPF is in its sixth year as a standard! Several community members have identified issues or suggested revisions to update, emend or enhance the standard. A call for comments and input from the EAD revision process has solicited a number of questions and suggestions that will form the launching point for the revision work. TS-EAS has determined that the revision process will be conducted through a two-tier strategy.

Update plan

In order to satisfy the requirements of the users that have implemented the standard, we plan to publish a technical update of the EAC-CPF in 2018. This update will comprise minor enhancements and a clean-up, e.g., we are going to
relax selected element contents and attribute values defined by regular expressions, add optional elements and attributes, and align elements and attributes definitions with EAD 3, if feasible. This update stage will ensure that the new EAC-CPF schema is backwards compatible. The EAC-CPF Tag Library will be updated accordingly.

Revision plan

While the EAC-CPF update will answer some of the questions and solve some open issues, more significant questions have emerged about certain aspects of the standard and the approach how to use and define this standard has been questioned. Addressing these general issues and tackling a major overhaul of EAC-CPF starts in 2018. We will publish all announcements about this process as it moves forward on the EAC-CPF website.

Stay updated

The TS-EAS subteam for EAC-CPF is discussing all issues via EAC-CPF GitHub portal. Feel free to check this page to stay updated about the details. Throughout the process we will also be seeking community input at each stage of the process and hope everyone will be engaged. We will announce next steps via the homepage news and the update release will surely communicated via the EAD-Mailinglist.