[tei-council] and then there's the TBOs question

[James Cummings]

msDesc (and predecessors) has for quite awhile been used by those 
cataloguing incunabula, and in every instance needing some hacks and 
abuse here and there to fit print-model concepts into a manuscript 
description.  I am, I admit, a bit uneasy at using ms* elements to 
describe things which aren't inscribed/written by hand.  However, it 
does seem to me that these are fairly minor changes which would satisfy 
a lot of people in the medium term.  But I do think that sometime in the 
next couple years we should be re-investigating the best way to handle 
manuscript and early print resources so that those cataloguing the 
latter are properly catered for.  I'd support these suggestions with the 
caveat that we should also return to the msDesc module at some point to 
loosen-up/re-examine some of its content models and make easier more 
general use of certain elements (like <physDesc>) by those not working 
with manuscript materials.

-James

Lou's Laptop wrote:
> A number of projects cataloguing early print material and
> incunables have reported that the current msdescription module meets
> most of their requirements, albeit with some grimaces about the names of the
> elements. It has been suggested that it would be desirable in the
> medium term to try to generalise the "ms*" elements into
> "text-bearing-object*". In the immediate short term however, a
> surprisingly small number of minor modifications would enable all of
> what is reported as needful by at least one major project aiming to
> catalogue incunables:
> 
> 1. the elements docAuthor, docDate, docImprint, and docTitle currently
> permitted only within a titlePage, should be made available within
> msItem and msContents.
> 
> 2. a new typeDesc element, analagous to handDesc, and as an
> alternative to it, is needed to contain descriptions of the
> typographic features of a printed source, within the physDesc.
> 
> 
> We could work this into the next release if there is general agreement 
> that it's not a step in the wrong direction... In any case, I propose 
> putting these two ideas into feature request form for discussion at the 
> next opportunity.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> tei-council mailing list
> tei-council at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> http://lists.village.Virginia.EDU/mailman/listinfo/tei-council


-- 
Dr James Cummings, Research Technologies Service, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk