This paper describes the MASTER project, an EU-funded project which in consort with several other related initiatives is attempting to define and implement a general purpose XML-based standard for the description of manuscript materials. We explain briefly the background and history of the project and discuss its links with other groups pursuing the same aim. At the time of writing, a preliminary draft of the MASTER standard is nearing completion; some indication of its underlying design principles and likely content is also included.
MASTER (Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records) is a thirty-month project funded by the Telematics for Libraries section of the European Union Fourth Framework research program. The partners in the project are: De Montfort University (leader); the Royal Library, the Hague; the Arnamagnaean Institute, Copenhagen; L'Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, Paris; the National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague; the University of Oxford. Associated partners in the project include several major European libraries, notably the British Library, the Vatican Library, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The project began on 1 January 1999.
The project is closely linked with the North American manuscript projects EAMMS (Electronic Access to Medieval Manuscripts) and Digital Scriptorium, and also with the international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). While the focus of this paper is on MASTER itself, we stress that the ideas described here result from much previous work by scholars in these and many other projects. The formal mechanism for this collaboration is a Work Group on Manuscript Description, chartered by the international Text Encoding Initative (TEI) and co-chaired by Consuelo Dutschke (Columbia University) and Ambrogio Piazzoni (Vatican Library). This Work Group was charged with developing a document type definition (DTD) for the description of manuscript material which would be compatible with existing TEI recommendations for machine-readable texts. The TEI Work Group's proposals will be submitted to the TEI's Technical Review Committee for ratification and eventual inclusion in a subsequent edition of the TEI Guidelines. Like other TEI workgroups, the group has a responsibility to ensure that its recommendations are acceptable to the broadest consensus within the domain; it is particularly useful therefore that so many different initiatives are represented on it.
In practical terms, cooperation amongst these projects is very close. For example, Dutschke is leader of both the EAMMS and Digital Scriptorium projects, co-chair of the TEI workgroup, and has attended all MASTER plenary meetings as an observer; as European editor of the TEI, Burnard is a member of the TEI Work Group as well as being primarily responsible for the standards development workpackage in MASTER; Robinson is leader of MASTER, a member of the EAMMS and Digital Scriptorium advisory boards, and a long-standing associate of the TEI having chaired one of its key technical committees.