[tei-council] Making absolutely bare a little more bare

[James Cummings]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> James Cummings wrote:
> 
>>
>> With any TEI document I look at these two elements often provide 
>> crucial bits of information: What is the availability of the document 
>> (i.e. what license, etc.) and is it an originally digital document or 
>> an electronic version of some print document or manuscript.   With the 
>> first of these in specific, we should be encouraging anyone creating a 
>> TEI document to state under what conditions it is made available. 
> 
> the publicationStmt is a lot easier to defend than the sourceDesc,
> probably. forceing the sourceDesc when there _is_ no source
> is the sticking point. born native docs have no source, after all,
> but do/should have a publication stmt

To simply play devil's advocate...  one could say that there is *always* 
a source.  That source can be a print document, or it can be another 
electronic document, or it can be your overly fertile mind.  By putting 
in 'Born Digital' you are indicating the source is the last of those. 
If you do not have a sourceDesc you are *not* indicating that it is Born 
Digital...instead you are saying _nothing_ about it, which is not only 
quite different but also a lot worse because suddenly we have no idea 
whether this has a source or not.

Removing the requirement for both of these elements encourages 
detrimental laxity in metadata about the document and arguably does a 
disservice to further the notion of the TEI as a serious set of guidelines.

However, I don't really care that much, but perhaps a representative of 
the TEI Library community might have some thoughts on this?

-James

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