Licensed under
Loosely based on AI1P01
Over the last few years, several groups have worked on the problem of defining standards for manuscript description. Of particular relevance to the TEI are :
- The TEI Medieval Manuscripts Description Work Group (TEI MMSS), headed by Consuelo Dutschke and Ambrogio Piazzoni, which first met in 1998; the last meeting (for which there are minutes) was in the autumn of 2000. Its proposed DTD is available on the TEI-MMSS website, but the final report of the Work Group, including the documentation for the DTD, has not yet been made available.
- MASTER (Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records), an EU-funded project headed by Peter Robinson, which ran from January 1999 to June 2001. The reference manual for the MASTER DTD, and the DTD itself, both unrevised since the end of the project period, are available at the Master project website.
There is, despite an avowed intention that there should not be, a degree of discrepancy between the two DTDs. In the absence of documentation from the Work Group, it is hard to assess the extent or rationale for the discrepancy, although in most cases it will presumably have been that one of the groups has simply paid more attention to one area than the other did. The MASTER project, for example, never finalised its discussion on seals, while the Work Group did, whereas MASTER developed quite sophisticated mechanisms for dealing with personal and place names, an area untouched by the Work Group. In this sense, the two schemes may be said to complement each other. There appears, however, to be one fundamental difference between to two, which is a tendency on the part of the Work Group toward a looser structure, but it is unlikely that the differences between the two are so great in this regard that a reconciliation is impossible.
At its 2001 meeting, the TEI Council requested the two groups to work towards a consensus, or to produce reports which could be collated by a third party, but no progress has yet been reported. The Council has now determined that a small task force should be charged with the job of identifying a common set of proposals, which will review both sets of proposals as currently articulated, also taking into account complementary work done in this area by other agencies, notably the Reportorium of Old Bulgarian Literarture and Letters.
The Task force is requested:-
- to review the current state of TEI-based recommendations for the detailed description of manuscript materials, in particular the proposals from Master, the TEI Workgroup, and the ROBLL
- to identify and define a common subset of those recommendations adequate to the needs of the TEI community
- to document that set of recommendations in such a way as to facilitate their inclusion in TEI P5, once approved by the TEI Council
The task force should do its work by email, mailing list, or telephone as the head of the group sees fit. No funding is available for in-person meetings.
A preliminary report should be submitted by the Chair in advance of the meeting of the May 2003 meeting of the Council. A final report should be available by 1st October 2003.
The Chair of the group is Matthew Driscoll. Members proposed by the Council are Merillee Proffitt and David Birnbaum. The Chair may choose to co-opt help from outside sources at his discretion. The TEI editors are ex officio members of the Taskforce.