Key: DMU-CTA De Montfort; IRHT Paris; NLP Prague; OU Oxford; KB Royal Library, the Hague; EAMSS US partners; VL Vatican Library; AP other associated partners; EG Expert group; BFM Marburg

Sixth Project Meeting, June 9 2001. St Cyril and Methodius National Library of Bulgaria, Sofia, Bulgaria

Present:

Apologies: Anne Korteweg KB

Agenda:

1. Minutes of last meeting
2. Business matters
3. Reports from the partners
4. Workshop reports
5. Possible business plan
6. Extensions/modifications to the DTD
7. General review of the MASTER DTD
8. Relation to continuing TEI workgroup
9. Other matters

PR has been in touch with Pat Manson to try and effect a smooth administrative closure to the project. It appeared that we would be able to achieve all our aims without modification to the contract (ie within the 10% variation ceiling for each partner). To PR's horror, it appears that NO-ONE has received any money following submission of the cost claims. [This has since been checked with Pat Manson, who says she has now signed the first lot of claims off.]

We are due to have a final review meeting. We agreed that all partners should attempt to come to this. [following discussions with Pat Manson: we have set a tentative date of September 18/19 for this. We can have a final MASTER meeting on the 18^th, and the review itself on the 19^th]

DMU - there is now no admin support since Natasha and Andrea have left. Adrian replaced by Andrew. A new catalogue at DMU allows uploading of records, and contains a full XML catalogue, holding 800+ descriptions. DMU may expand it to allow full display of TEI document. All the documentation on the MASTER website has been revised.

AMI: All staff have left after money dried out. MD has been revising records for consistency. 511 records, about half of which are very detailed. They will need checking for content, a huge task. The sister institution in Iceland has received grants for cataloguing and have two full-time cataloguers. All records in Icelandic. The Ministry of Education and Culture has decided to make MASTER the national standard for manuscript descriptions. In Lund Univ. a library digitization project has huge amount of money for scanning and cataloguing their small collection of manuscripts - they will be using the MASTER standard. Also the National Library and Academy of Sciences in Lithuania wil be using MASTER.

Bulgaria: Thirty descriptions have been made in the MASTER format. There appear to be some omissions, including figurative descriptions and watermarks. Watermarks are present but need revision. Also, we require an attribute headnote for decoNote. Milena suggests clarification needed on bilingua descriptions and use of non-Roman character sets.

Oxford: Richard has done work on administrative metadata. Lou revised DTD in October: a version control system needed. There has been some concertation work. including a paper in Spain, discussions with Wellcome Institute, workshops (including development of teaching materials), in Milan, Paris, and Vilnius. TEI Consortium now formally constituted, and has three years funding in the US. Emacs has been enhanced to handle non-Roman character sets.

IRHT: Malcolm left in October - Jacques had taken over Muriel's work as keeper of the database. Elisabeth has written an article. Workshops in March (two days) and May (one day). Interest from Barcelona. Lots of interest from National Library and Archives: the National Library are especially keen to pursue the XML solution, especially for writing systems. XML now being adopted as optimum standard. The IRHT is digitizing some 100,000 manuscript images, with a view to web dissemination of many of these. The IRHT is now committed to XML as the language for everything.

Prague: MASTER now incorporated into cataloguing processes - two cataloguers now using standard. Now testing conversion of OBM records into MASTER. Idea to produce joint central European catalogue. Some interest from Slovak community. Some 200 manuscript descriptions have now been made by Prague, and many incunables and medieval archive descriptions have also been made with the MASTER system.

The Hague: Klaas has now left. Before he did, he produced some 200 descriptions. Plenty of interest in the Netherlands in using MASTER.

Lou suggested a message on the MASTER website asking people to let us see records they produce, and also list of links to their catalogues.

Milan: 35 attended, very successful. We've revised training documentation since then

Prague, attended by 12 people from six countries

Vilnius (16 people from 3 libraries)

Paris (20 attendees) and Orleans (15 attended)

Copenhagen (15 )

The Hague (12)

Aberystwyth (15) where PR discovered that one should not try to teach a workshop alone

So far, 140 people have attended MASTER workshops. There was universal agreement that the workshops were an enormous success: the standard is accessible, the software is usable, everything works. Commonly: manuscript scholars who come to the workshops with NO knowledge of XML are able to make a complex description with less than one day of instruction, parse it, and put it on the web.

Future workshops: Sofia, London and Marburg to come.

We have to produce a business plan for the EU. PR doubts that a 'business' plan is appropriate,though some kind of 'plan' certainly is. LB suggested some possibilities include a central repository for records (not popular) providing a testbed for this type of thing (we have done that!). or consultancy service. None of these look viable as a 'paid for' service (the rich won't pay, the poor can't pay), although Matthew suggested many libraries would pay for a package. We're forbidden from making this a private standard. Perhaps TEI would take on training etc if MASTER integrates into the TEI. We could do with a system for training local trainers and support staff, along with local websites and workshops in local languages. This is exactly the scheme for the ESTATE project.

LB suggested we map out the costs of maintaining MASTER as a consultancy/central training/standards service. PR said he would do this, as part of preparing the EU required business plan.

Class and subject classification etc for texts

Peter has put documentation on this on the web: idea is to use classDecl in encodingDesc to describe taxonomies. Then use class attribute on msItem. Merilee asked about using LCSH. Currently no way to attach keywords to msItems, only to whole description if in header. Lou suggests adding keywords to msContents and msItem. This could then be used to hold LCSH information. Agreed to add this to DTD. We should also give an example of this on the MASTER site.

Lou brought up question of helping people document their local cataloguing rules. Peter thinks we should have more pointers to the cataloguing rules: they are there but not too many people find them.

Digital images

How to integrate images, transcriptions, captions, catchwords. Persian fables example uses pb - yuck! Peter also showed example using invented pageinf element. Also showed Richard's suggestion based on the DLF document.

Images: figure and figdesc are standard TEI elements. Pb not a good idea as they may not correspond to page breaks. Richard suggested using corresp attribute to point to pb - Lou suggested using it the other way round. Lou wants to put all the images together in one place.

Matthew suggested introducing new element (image) for pictures of whole page.

Figure can be used within any p within the description if necessary. To create a link to an external image we should use xref or ref.

Transcriptions: Richard suggested looking at DLF document on TEI practices. Zdenek came up with a new scheme involving parallel representations of a manuscript at the page level. Unfortunately the pb element will not allow us to include the information we want.

Matthew suggested using layout element to represent physical structure, and then point to page descriptions from pb elements in body. Some discussion about whether images should be in body or in new element (pageDesc).

One suggestions: metadata (page descriptions) in the header, two divs one with images, one with transcription. Options to be defined and examples to be drawn up.

Agreed? pbs within section that contains intellectual content - corresp attribute on pbs div containing figures contain ids to which pbs point.

Finally: we came up with:

Case 1: we have a sequence of images only, with a <msDescription> element: ie no transcription, no edition. We do this:

• Place <msDescription> in the teiHeader
• Place information about each image in a sequence of <figure> elements in the <body> of the document

Case 2: we want to refer to just one image at one point, anywhere in the description. We do this:

• If we want the image to APPEAR at that point: use <figure>
• If we want a LINK to the image: use xptr/xref to point at it

Case 3: we want to integrate a transcription/edition with full image data. We were not fully agreed on this. One possibility is:

• Place the msDescription in the teiHeader (but some people would prefer it to be in a div in body)
• Have a <div> in body containing the transcription/edition. At every point where there is a page break corresponding to an image: use <pb> with corres=XXX: the corres attribute is an IDREF and should point at the ID of the figure holding the image of this page
• Have a <div> in body containing the <figure> elements as in case one.

This provides a quite smooth 'upgrade path' from case 1 to case 3. The discussion was also notable for Lou's assertion that a TEI document containing a single <div> element is impossible.

Case 4: we want to give elaborate metadata for page and image. We looked at a record from NLW which uses RLG elements inside label elements and subsidiary Dublin Core information, including identifiers. Also looked at Richard's metadata for Oxford Digital Library. We want to do this but don't know how to. Richard and Lou to draw up discussion document on image and page metadata by end July.

Incunables

Many people are using MASTER for cataloguing incunabula, and are running into difficulties in recording copy information. Why not use TEI and extend it rather than use MASTER? Richard suggested main need is to disaggregate useful features of msDesc from its structure: agreed that this needs to be looked at at level of overall TEI revision. Matt suggested a thing <textObject>. It is too big a task for this group to tackle. Our advice to people using MASTER to catalogue incunables? Don't do it! (not very helpful)

Language: many felt that language and writing systems should be separated. Acknowledged that this is a problem, but it needs looking at in the context of TEI as a whole. There is mention of this in the MASTER documentation: needs spreading around more, in a FAQ.

Name element: sorted.

Things we missed out (eg seal): Lou has got some stuff from Matthew and others but hasn't incorporated it yet. Need to put sealDesc element into physDesc. Proposed contents: sealDesc (seal+) - seal contains decoNote. Agreed to add this to the DTD.

Headpiece: should be a type in decoNote, which is CDATA. Some discussion of whether it is appropriate to include material such as maps or illustrations in decoNote.

Watermarks: current system pretty weak - watermark contains p only. How to refer to established systems for identifying watermarks. Guidelines indicate we should use ref elements to refer to Briquet numbers etc. This needs documenting with examples.

Peter suggested FAQ page. Suggested questions include:

• how to cite other manuscripts (use ref, with targtype)
• how to link to external bibliographies
• how to handle images, etc etc etc

Elisabeth asked whether colophon should be in history rather than msItem. Use <q> to do this.

Question of rubrics and fragments came up again. Can use defective element to cope with fragmentation. Use type attribute on rubric to indicate initial. final. linking etc.

There had been little contact with the workgroup for a while, though there had been considerable activity on the TEI-MSS discussion group. Lou reported on the TEI board meeting. The workgroup appears not now to be an official TEI workgroup, but they and MASTER have been asked to produce reports for TEI technical committee to look at. The TEI Working group is to meet in Lund in 16-23 June, to produce documentation. We should send our documentation to the TEI - hopefully a future revision of the TEI will include features from our work. The TEI group has adopted a looser document model than the MASTER group, so that our records will parse against theirs, but not vice versa. We may also have two distinct sets of documentation.

Future meetings: no more funding for meetings, except for final review in Luxembourg. The partners reviewed their plans:

Leicester: the catalogue will be kep alive until at least the end of the year. DMU plans to continue a facility for individuals to load in their own descriptions online. DMU will pursue the possibility of a paid service: libraries would pay to load records and maintain them.

Prague: Zdenek will build and maintain his own system.

AMI: Icelanders will build their own catalogue - should be able to catalogue entire AMI collection using their funding.

Paris: IRHT would like to link the IRHT catalogue through XML to some 170 printed vols of ms descriptions in computer readable form

Sofia: initiatives are in progress with negotation with government agency for the development of the standard. This will need translation of the standard.