[tei-council] TEI P5 chapter on MS description

[M. J. Driscoll]

Dear colleague,

As you know, the TEI has recently announced the 
availability of a major new section of the TEI Guidelines 
concerned with manuscript description. This chapter 
contains much additional material, largely derived from 
work carried out during the last few years in the MASTER, 
Digital Scriptorium, and other significant projects. Like 
other parts of the next release of the TEI Guidelines, the 
chapter is already open for public comment via the TEI 
Sourceforge and TEI-L lists, and significant proposals have 
already been acted on to improve the draft. 

It seems to us and to the TEI Council that it would be 
highly desirable also to request a formal detailed review 
of the whole chapter from a small number of recognised 
experts in the field, and I am writing to ask whether you 
would be willing to provide such a review. The Council has 
requested this review in part as a means of determining the 
future course of action, in particular whether or not to 
set up a work group to tackle areas not covered in the 
draft. Your input would be of great assistance to the TEI 
Editors and the TEI Technical Council in the production of 
TEI P5, and would be much appreciated.

On the assumption that you are able to provide such a 
review, a more detailed description of what is needed 
follows. If you cannot, please let us know as soon as 
possible (and please forgive us for bothering you).

You are encouraged both to make general comments about the 
usability or relevance of the draft material under review, 
and to make specific suggestions for any changes you think 
advisable or essential. At this stage, proof reading and 
reporting of typographic errors are of lesser importance, 
but notification of any such errors will also be gratefully 
received. 

The questions we would like you to address in your review 
are:

- coverage: does the draft cover all significant topics 
relevant to the subject matter? are all aspects of the 
topics addressed treated adequately and consistently? 

- clarity: is the draft likely to be comprehensible to its 
intended audience? is its treatment of specialised topics 
accessible to the well-informed but non-specialist reader? 

- correctness: are the encoding techniques proposed in the 
draft adequate to the needs of the community? do you 
envisage any particular problems in converting between the 
draft's recommendations and any other encoding system 
commonly used in the field?

- consistency: is the draft internally consistent in its 
style and coverage, or are some topics treated less 
adequately than others? are the recommendations of the 
draft consistent in style and substance with the rest of 
the TEI Guidelines?

Wherever possible, please supply clear indications of what 
in your opinion is necessary to improve the draft; specific 
suggestions are much more helpful than general statements.

Please review the examples as well as the descriptive text: 
any suggestions for additional or alternative usage 
examples for the topics described are particularly helpful.

Please also, if possible, test the recommendations of the 
chapter in your own TEI processing environment. To do this, 
we recommend you to download and install a complete release 
of TEI P5, since there are likely to be interdependencies 
between almost any part of the Guidelines and any other, 
even for a relatively self-contained chapter such as that 
on manuscript description. Information on how to download 
is provided at http://www.tei-c.org/P5/index.xml and a more 
detailed document on how to install the new system is in 
preparation (a draft is available at http://www.tei-
c.org/Drafts/edw88.xml).

The full release also includes some sample testfiles which 
may be useful as a template for your own testing: look at 
the files in the Test directory

If you plan only to review the prose of the draft, then of 
course you need only access the web pages at http://www.tei-
c.org/P5/ where you will find links to the most recent 
draft in HTML format.

Your review can be as long or as short as you think fit. If 
you would like to discuss aspects of the review with other 
specialists in the field, please use the discussion list 
maintained by the TEI Manuscripts SIG (see http://www.tei-
c.org/Activities/SIG/ for details on this and other SIGs).

DEADLINE

Please send a copy of your final review to the addresses 
editors at tei-c.org and mjd at hum.ku.dk to arrive by midnight 
on 15 June 2005. It is planned to collate all the reviews 
and publish their recommendations together with a detailed 
response from the Council within two months of that date.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Driscoll