BPG Revision 3 Public Comment Feedback

Public Comment Feedback

Posted below are public comments we have received as of April 29, 2009, 1:30 pm EST for review during our DLF-sponsored meeting on May 6th. All comments, except for one, posted thus far have been on the TEI-LIB list. The non-list feedback was sent directly to Kevin and Michelle.

Comments can also be followed by searching the TEI-LIB Archive, April 2009, Week 4 threads: https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A1=ind0904D&L=TEILIB-L&X=3D9C3B36AB0318DF79&Y

TEI Header

• Why do MARC245a / MARC245b / MARC245c include upper case when all the other type values I've ever seen use only lower case? Could we also have a brief mention in the guidelines of the difference between those three? The NZETC currently uses type="marc245" (changed recently from type="245" when we move to P5), and not being a cataloguer, I have no idea whether that should be a, b, or c.
• With indo, there is no discussion of what to do with 'local standards' for example in New Zealand there's a very important numbering system called Books In Maori or BIM. We've been thinking of using this in the TEI header, but it would be completely opaque to those outside New Zealand and the field of Polynesian Languages and thus needs some explanation, but it's not clear where that should go.
• Maybe add a note that when using type="translated" xml:lang also needs to be used?

Level 2, Minimal Encoding

• Div1, div, and ab are all found in level 1, and hence covered by the introductory sentence to the table. Either have a table consisting solely of front, back, and head, or say something like: "Use all elements specified in Level 1 with the following additions and refinements." Later on, you don't carry previously mentioned elements forward.

Level 4, Basic Content Analysis

• Perhaps add a column indicating the TEI Tite equivalents?

Level 5, Scholarly Encoding Projects

• Add a section on allowable tags, but indicate that it is [not?] the whole set.

General recommendations/comments

• There are _lots_ of references to specific tags in the document. It would be great it these were converted to links to the page in the standard for the tag.

• There are lots of examples in the text. Would it be possible to submit these (or at least the short ones) for inclusion into the text of the standard?
  • I think these are probably symptomatic of the fact that I feel the guidelines are too far from main TEI standard, but that the separation is possibly more about presentation and less about content. By reinforcing the links between the guidelines an the standard we bring them closer together in practise.

Numbered Divs

• Although it is not really present in the Guidelines, my sense is that numbered divs should almost be treated as deprecated. The problems they create, especially in interchange and aggregation is large. See http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/DS.html#DSDIV3 for a bit of a discussion.

Linking between text and images

• Does this mean that you are explicitly not using the text | facsimile mechanism introduced in P5? Perhaps if in fact this is not recommended for library practice it should be indicated?

Structure of the TEI Document

• Should you perhaps link in this (whole) front section to the relevant sections of the guidelines (and reference tite, where relevant). And generally be more generous with references to P5. Later you do a lot of that, but these sections here would also work.