[mei-catalog-ig] Minutes from the MEI Cataloging and Metadata IG in Tours

[Axel Teich Geertinger]

Dear MEI Metadata Interest Group

As you know, the metadata group convened last week in Tours after another very inspiring Music Encoding Conference. About 20 people participated in the meeting. I will try to summarize below the discussions.

The main topic on the agenda was the planning of the metadata workshop to be held at the Mainz Academy on November 7-9 which Johannes has already announced on this list. As Johannes pointed out, we do not intend it to be a get-to-know-each-other-and-tell-us-about-your-project meeting; nor is it intended to be an introduction to using MEI metadata. Instead, common needs and problems should be identified. A primary objective of the workshop should be to agree on a number of recommendations on how to use the MEI header in various situations. The goal is to improve interchangeability and encourage users to include at least a minimum of relevant metadata in their encodings.
We agreed on the following plan for the workshop: Each of the first two days there will be short, hopefully motivating presentations as follows:
Day 1: Overview of the possibilities and concept of MEI metadata as compared with, for instance, MARC; general motivation (Johannes)
Day 2: Demonstrations of MerMEId (Axel) and the use of metadata in the Detmold Court Theatre Project (Kristina)
After the presentations we will work in groups of perhaps 6-10 persons grouped by use cases and interests, for instance: Library catalogs, thematic catalogs, source descriptions for critical editions etc. Each group will try to outline recommendations for their particular use case and present them in plenum for discussion.

There was some discussion about whether such recommendations should be conceived as different levels of complexity reaching from an absolute minimum (level 1) to very complex (level 3, 4 or whatever number of levels we agree on) or rather as a number of independent, optional sets or modules (not to be confused with schema modules) to be added to the minimal header. This remains to be clarified.

In addition to defining certain levels of complexity, some of the areas that we could try to make recommendations about could include: the use of authority files; classification systems to use; and how to encode source descriptions for compositions in single-source collections - one file for each composition with repeating source descriptions, all compositions in a single file, separate files pointing to a single description...?

Another discussion concerned whether the upcoming stripped-down version of the MEI schema, MEI Basic (the name was revealed at the conference), should impose restrictions not only on the elements and attributes available in the music encoding but also in the header. Such restrictions could correspond to, for instance, a 'level 1' header. The general opinion was, however, not to implement such restrictions in the header since the motivation for a restricted model of the music encoding is not necessarily the same as a motivation for using only minimal metadata.

The workshop's final day will include a presentation of the results to invited representatives from editions under the auspices of the academy and a demonstration of the Freischütz Digital.

Prior to the workshop the participating editions/projects will be asked to hand in sample metadata encodings or lists of metadata they will want to use in their projects (due 1 August). The organizing group (Johannes, Kristina, Axel) will collect them and communicate them to the participants in some form in October in order to give an overview over the existing or intended metadata scopes and to prepare the working groups.


The Metadata Group further discussed the planned changes of the <classification> model proposed recently by Perry. There were no objections to the new model that allows for any number of hierarchically ordered classification systems (taxonomies/ontologies). Such classification systems can be either included in the same file or pointed to. The use of classifications declared in this way will not be restricted to the header; you may use it to classify almost anything in your encoding, including elements within the encoded music notation.
To prevent a chaotic jungle of self-invented taxonomies, our interest group has the responsibility to provide recommendations on which existing taxonomies to use (we can do some of this work as part of the Mainz workshop, cf. above).

Finally, I gave a summary of new features in the MerMEId metadata editor since last year. Improvements include: migration to MEI 3.0.0; added buttons in the Rich Text Editor for marking up highlighted text as selected MEI elements: <persName>, <geogName>, <corpName>, or <title>; MEI-encoded incipits now uploadable from file; source components can now have items. Future plans include providing installation containers (Docker or similar) for easy setup of new MerMEId servers.
Github is now the repository for development, so any MerMEId issues can be reported or discussed there.
A feature requested by members of the IG was the possibility to import/export to/from MARC to start new headers from library or RISM records or to export them back to those catalogs. I will discuss it with Kristina and/or Laurent who both are working with this type of conversion.


Best,
Axel

Axel Teich Geertinger
Centerleder
Head of Centre
Dansk Center for Musikudgivelse
Danish Centre for Music Editing

+45 9132 4706
atge at kb.dk<mailto:atge at kb.dk>


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Det Kgl. Bibliotek
Royal Danish Library

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DK-1221 København K
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