FYI, forwarded on behalf of Lou Burnard (lou.burnard@oucs.ox.ac.uk):
[It occurs to us that there may be some members of these mailing lists who would also be interested in the following mailing, which we therefore forward with the usual apologies for any duplicated postings]
Dear colleague,
This email is being sent to you because we think you are or were interested in using the MASTER dtd for marking up manuscript descriptions.
It's over ten years since Peter Robinson first organized a meeting at Studley Priory to discuss the possibility of developing an international standard for manuscript description. The work done by the MASTER project which followed that meeting established a preliminary and highly influential candidate for such a standard. In the last decade, the MASTER DTD or versions of it have been adopted by dozens of different manuscript cataloguing projects worldwide and the most recent version of the Text Encoding Initiatives P5 Guidelines is based upon it.
The Manuscriptorium Project at the National Library of the Czech Republic (http://www.manuscriptorium.com/) is one of the largest European cataloguing projects based on the MASTER DTD. We are now working on defining a new TEI P5 conformant schema for this system and also in developing conversion tools for existing records collections to be migrated to the new schema. This work is being done as part of the ENRICH (European Networking Resources and Information concerning Cultural Heritage) project, funded by the EU eContentPlus programme.
Part of the workplan involves a review of other MASTER-based systems, in an attempt to learn from their experiences, good or bad, in different contexts. We have set up a short online questionnaire for this purpose at http://tinyurl.com/yutq2r -- if you have ever used MASTER in some form, or simply considered using it, we very much hope you will be able to spare a little time to complete the questionnaire. It should not take you more than 10 minutes.
We will be holding a special one day workshop to discuss the outcome of this survey at the University of Copenhagen at the end of February: if you would like to attend this meeting, please let us know. Please also feel free to pass this enquiry on to others you know of who might be interested.
With best wishes, and thanks in advance for your input
Lou Burnard (Oxford University) Matthew Driscoll (Copenhagen University)