TEI Header

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TEI header recommendations for the Best Practices Guidelines

Work plan

A joint meeting of the DLF TEI Task Force and TEI SIG on Libraries was held at the DLF Spring Forum 2008. One of the topics of discussion was the "TEI Text Encoding in Libraries Guidelines for Best Encoding Practices" (henceforth "TEI in Libraries Guidelines"). During a discussion of this document's recommendations on headers, Kevin Hawkins questioned the wisdom of developing extensive guidelines on metadata encoding in the TEI header when libraries were already storing this information in central metadata repositories like an ILS. Kevin suggested that he and Melanie Schlosser propose some models for the TEI header with links to external metadata sources and varying amounts of metadata stored in the TEI document. Others suggested that they post these proposals to the TEI wiki and start a discussion in the "discussion" tab of the wiki page and later on TEILIB-L.

Version 2.1 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines includes element recommendations for the TEI header based on these earlier documents:

• http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/tei/tei-usmarc.html
• http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaheim/teiguide.html

Natasha Smith said she has a spreadsheet on TEI/MARC mappings, a copy of which is also on the TEI website. In case this provides any information not available in version 2.1 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines or the other two obsolete documents, Kevin asked Natasha for a copy of this.

After the meeting, Syd Bauman offered to help, especially in determining ease of P5 customization. Later, Michelle Dalmau said she and Matthew Gibson would review Lisa McAulay's meeting notes and set up some mini working groups on various sections of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.

Kevin and Melanie will do the following:

1. Review version 2.1 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines to suggest corrections -- everything from attributes not allowed on elements in the teixlite.dtd to more substantive changes to the recommendations -- endeavoring to maintain conformance to the TEI Lite schema.
2. Prepare sample headers for reformatted and born-digital texts conforming to their proposed corrections to version 2.1.
3. Prepare P5 Lite versions of these as well. Have Syd test for conformance and ease of customization using Roma.
4. Bring revised guidelines and sample files to the SIG to discuss by editing the TEI in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Practices in the wiki.
5. Based on latest version agreed to by SIG, create more sample headers that refer to external metadata stores sources, METS or MODS files, or both. Propose recommendations with varying amounts of metadata omitted from the TEI header (which will likely break TEI conformance).
6. Present these new samples to the group to discuss.
7. Make additional changes to the TEI in Libraries Guidelines if necessary.

Status

Syd didn't like using Word to track revisions, so we made the revisions right in the wiki instead of doing these separately. See http://www.tei-c.org/wiki/index.php/TEI_in_Libraries:_Guidelines_for_Best_Practices#The_TEI_Header .

We'll create a sample header once we reach concensus on the text of the best practices guide.