-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Manuscript description Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 12:46:55 +0100 From: M. J. Driscoll mjd@hum.ku.dk Reply-To: mjd@hum.ku.dk To: TEI-L@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU

The next version of the TEI Guidelines, P5, will contain a major new chapter on manuscript description. Although developed with the needs of manuscript scholars working in the European tradition, it is hoped that the scheme presented there is general enough so that it can also be extended to other kinds of materials and other traditions. The tagset documented in the chapter is based chiefly on that developed by MASTER (1999-2001), an EU-funded project headed by Peter Robinson, and the work of the TEI Medieval Manuscripts Description Work Group (1998-2000), headed by Consuelo Dutschke and Ambrogio Piazzoni. Although the work of these two groups proceeded in tandem (members of each attending the other's meetings and so on), and despite an avowed intention that a single set of recommendations should emerge from them, there were, in the end, substantial discrepancies between the two. In 2002 the TEI Council appointed a special task-force whose job was to review both sets of proposals and identify and document a common subset of those recommendations adequate to the needs of the TEI community, taking into account the actual experience of the many projects using MASTER as well as complementary work done in this area by other agencies, notably the Repertorium of Old Bulgarian Literature and Letters. The result, we believe, is not simply a "common subset" of the two schemes, but rather represents a significant improvement on both, which at the same time lays the foundation for future work.

A draft of the chapter is now available for comment on the TEI website: http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Activities/MS/

Specific suggestions, corrections, enhancements (i.e. "feature requests") should be sent to http://tei.sourceforge.net/, while general comments can be posted to the TEI-L list or to the undersigned.

We ask for volunteers interested in working on conversion of legacy data to the new format, and would be keen to receive examples which could be used in the chapter. Finally, although the major strength of the scheme we propose is that it offers the choice between loosely structured and highly structured data at every level, it is clear that there are still areas (chiefly specific aspects of physical bibliography) for which more richly structured content models need to be developed and we would therefore be keen to hear from people who might be interested in proposing such models.

M. J. Driscoll Arnamagnaean Institute Copenhagen