SUMMARY Although there has been recent speculation about applying the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Document Type Definition (DTD) to a host of descriptive outputs, including catalog records and subject guides, its perceived need, design, and development emerged from the American archival community's focus on that special subset of finding aids known as collection inventories and registers. This article briefly analyzes the traditional function and structure of these finding aids in a paper-based form and explores how longtime interest in disseminating these guides electronically led to the formation of the Berkeley Finding Aid Project in 1993, and five years later, to the version 1.0 release of EAD. The author provides a basic outline of EAD's structure and demonstrates that although much of its design stems from American archival practice, its developers tried from the outset to create a data model that would merit international support and address the needs of a wide variety of archival institutio...