Future changes to Best Practices for TEI in Libraries

This page describes changes to the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries which will be made at some point but which will not hold up a major release of this document.

milestone element

<milestone unit="typography" n="******"/> -- Is this TEI-conformant? Is there a better way to do this in any case?

This is not TEI conformant, unless you think that "*****" is a valid way of naming something (here this particular milestone). I would suggest

<milestone type="separator" unit="nonstructural" rend="stars"/>

Or possibly

<space dim="vertical" extent="[whatever]" rend="stars"/>

Or you could use <ornament> if you have followed tite in adding it. LouBurnard

I agree with Lou that “typography” is not really a unit, and stars are not really a label for the unit, whatever it is. I’m not fond of <space> for this purpose, but perhaps there are convincing arguments I haven’t considered. I quite like

<milestone type="separator" unit="nonstructural" rend="stars"/>

except that I think, in general, these units are structural. So I would prefer "undetermined" as the value of unit=. Syd Bauman

deprecate key in favor of ref using a URN

The TEI Council, after discussing feature request 2919640, decided at its April 2010 meeting in Dublin to change the Guidelines to recommend use of @ref with a URN in place of @key. Revisions to P5 are forthcoming.

If we work this revision into the BP, we will probably need to revise our section on "key and ref" to something like:

<author><persName type="marc100" ref="lccn:n78-95332">Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616</persName></author>

Not sure whether use of <taxonomy> is still warranted.

The TEI Header

• consider whether various MARC 1xx and 7xx subfields could be broken out into components of persName. If so, we'll change recommendations for persName@type.

list of elements deleted and changed by our ODDs

Syd's list of elements is now on a different wiki page because this page is meant for things to be addressed once version 3.0 is complete. (Which is now entirely out of date. —Syd)

Identifiers for outside metadata?

Metadata Working Group

Per discussion at the SIG on Libraries meeting in Ann Arbor, Syd put out a call for members of a working group to look at the relationship between the TEI header and other sources of metadata. This group will formulate recommendations for the TEI Council and/or for the text of the Best Practices. However, as decided a few times in the past, release of the Best Practices will not be held up for this group's work to finish because of the large scope of the work.

Pending Issues Discussed

Should we have a place in the header to indicate an identifier for an outside metadata record for the item? Examples:

• record number for the source document in the local catalog
• record number for the source document in WorldCat
• record number for this TEI document in the local catalog
• record number for this TEI document in WorldCat

Having such a link would allow a delivery system to provide an unambiguous link to this full metadata without relying on matching other information in the header like a title, ISBN, or call number. (Kshawkin)

Yes, I think we should. How about the spot where the TEI Guidelines recommend putting the code for the classification of the text (in some scheme), <classCode> inside <classDec>, or is that too much of a stretch? (—Syd)

During the call on 2/10/09, Syd said he no longer thinks use of classCode (and a corresponding classDecl) is a good idea. Instead, he suggested we createa new element, otherDesc, to contain elements from outside the TEI namespace for metadata not covered by the TEI header. The GBP could specify how this element is used. (Kshawkin)

NOTE: we talked about this during our conf call on 2/10/09; we decided to have a sub-group conference call on 2/17/09 to talk in more detail about this. Emcaulay

We didn't get to this on 2009-02-17, so we postponed to 2009-03-03. However, few people showed up, so we postponed again. As Syd put it, there are two issues to consider here:

A. What mechanism should we use to we point from the TEI header to metadata located outside the TEI document? (For example, how do you identify a MARC, METS, or MODS record that provides additional metadata about the TEI document and/or the source document?)

B. Should we provide a recommendation on storing non-TEI metadata within the TEI document (using a different element namespace)? For example, should we allow Dublin Core elements anywhere in the TEI header?

---

Email discussions in late March 2009 and early April 2009 with Syd, Melanie, Kevin, Michelle and Glen did not reach a conclusion. Tentative plans for the future would do this sort of thing when an element has the @ref attribute:

<author>
  <persName xml:id="persName_1" ref="http://authorities.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?AuthRecID=1563939&v1=1&HC=1&SEQ=20090404152214&PID=wRSbpUQ7Uptm_ypRikIdNPzF">Welles, Gideon, 1802-1878.</persName>
</author>

except that in your example there's no @type or other method for describing the relationship between the content of <persName> and the value of @ref. P5 says that @ref "provides an explicit means of locating a full definition for the entity being named by means of one or more URIs", but we are looking for a typology of some sort for these links and need a place to indicate the type of link.

And we'd do this when there's no @ref:

<sourceDesc id="sourceDesc_1">
[. . .]
</sourceDesc>

for which you'd find elsewhere in the document:

<link type="MARCsource" target="#sourceDesc_1 http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/F/?func=direct&doc_number=000601789&local_base=MIU01_PUB"/>

link elements might be grouped together in one of these places:

• TEI/teiHeader/profileDesc/creation/ab/linkGrp
• 1st child of <text> last child of <text>
• TEI/text/back/div[@type='editorial']/linkGrp

---

UPDATE: We'll probably use <idno> in various header elements: see https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2493417&group_id=106328&atid=644065 . In any case, we'll need to tell people how much metadata to include in TEI header if they will also have external, possibly canonical, metadata sources.

---

While at the Swinburne conference with John I happen to look over his shoulder while he was encoding and I noticed his use of <relatedItem> in the <biblStruct>: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-relatedItem.html. You may have come across this already in your break-out meetings, but at a quick glance, the application seems to fit our needs: <relatedItem> contains or references some other bibliographic item which is related to the present one in some specified manner, for example as a constituent or alternative version of it. John was using it in conjunction with an embedded <note> to provide additional context. <ptr> and <ref> are also valid within <relatedItem>. (—Mdalmau)

this element is designed to reference a bibliographic item, not another metadata record or a single piece of metadata. So I don't think it's quite right. (Kshawkin)

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See Syd's call for participation in a working group.

extent element

Instead of

<extent>viii, [7]-215 p</extent>
<extent>20 cm.</extent> 

we might use elements from the msDescription module and do it this way:

<extent>viii, [7]-215 p</extent>
<extent>
  <height quantity="20" unit="cm"/>
</extent>

Had a width been given for this item in the catalog record, in the header it would have been:

<extent>viii, [7]-215 p</extent>
<extent>
  <width quantity="30" unit="cm"/>
  <height quantity="20" unit="cm"/>
</extent>

appInfo and application

Consider inclusion of these elements in the header. Lou wrote, "There is at least one proposal forthcoming for further work on defining the scope and usage of these elements". Wait for these proposals to make their way into P5 before revisiting this question.

children of editorialDecl

Per a change in P5, editorialDecl can now have mixed content of

s and specialized elements like <hyphenation>. Revisit our decision to put all content into

s and come up with recommended uses for specialized elements.

indicating interviewers and interviewees

Section “Level 4 Oral History” currently recommends that the speaking participants in the interview be identified is as authors of the document, or in profileDesc/particDesc/list/item/name. In the example encoding of this interviewees and interviewers are differentiated as text inside the given <item>. This strikes me as sloppy. It may well be appropriate to permit this encoding, in case someone is digitizing hundreds of interviews and has OCRed metadata that lists the participants this way. But certainly a best practice would make use of <listPerson>, and explicitly indicate "interviewer", "interviewee", "thirdParty" (or whatever) on the role= of <person>, no? —Syd

encoding <pb>s within <note>s

Give guidance on encoding of <pb/>s within <note>s. Should these be encoded or omitted, with the <note> element appearing in the XML "within" the page on which it began? (Note that the BP allows for local practice in gathering all notes for a given section to a div at the end of the section.)

If encoding such <pb/>s will be optional or required, there will generally be two instances of <pb n="X"/> every time a note crosses a page boundary. Should we recommend use of @sameAs or @corresp to indicate that you are encoding the same page break twice? See this thread on TEI-L.

providing stylesheets

providing stylesheets for header-MARC and header-MODS

• From MARC to TEI Header
  • Black Mesa Technologies has undertaken this work for us (gratis)!
• From Tite to Level 3.5 (Syd recommendation)

providing tools

providing tools for workflows

mention RDA

The section "Determining Data Values for the TEI Header" mentions AACR2 and ISBD(ER). Perhaps also mention RDA?