post-call cleanup

[M. J. Driscoll]

Dear Christian and other members of the council,

While I would not like to say that the work of the MS-
description task-force has stalled, there is little new to 
report just at the moment, and so our not appearing on the 
agenda for last week's conference call was not an 
oversight, still less a "failure". Things have begun 
happening again, however, and I think we all feel confident 
that we can have something in place for P5.  In keeping 
with our original charge, what this "something" will be is 
a set of recommendations for a single tagset capable of 
representing both loosely structured and highly structured 
descriptions which draws on MASTER and the work of the TEI-
MMSS workgroup (with significant input from the David 
Birnbaum's Repertorium project). It is clear, however, that 
there is still a significant need to develop more richly 
structured content models than those provided by any of the 
existing systems or their synthesis; what is needed now are 
recommendations for encoding manuscript descriptions that 
would transcend these existing systems, providing a rich 
and workable next-generation recommendation. For this, as 
David Birnbaum has proposed, we feel we need to be re-
chartered as a workgroup.

But first things first.

Matthew

M. J. Driscoll
Arnamagnaean Institute
Copenhagen