[MEI-L] form & function

[Johannes Kepper]

Hi all,

for the Edirom, we need to describe sources in a way that currently  
seems to be unsupported by MEI (please correct me, Perry). We have no  
encoded music to imply some of the information, so it needs to be  
declared explicitly somewhere.

What we need is a distinction of the source's form: score, voices,  
piano reduction… and also of it's function: sketch, fair copy,  
presentation copy, working manuscript, performance material…

When thinking about prints, there might be the need for an explicit  
labelling of first prints.



Regarding the form, a simple attribute @form on <source> might be  
sufficient in most cases (what do you think about using <extent>  
instead???).

For the function, we probably need an own element, probably as direct  
child of <source> and sibling of <physdesc>. It might turn out that  
the very same source serves a multiple or different functions in one  
or more editions, and in that case we would need to specify the  
context of the function with the help of an appropriate attribute.  
This context thing is nothing we're currently worried about, but I see  
some future problems in this field, and we should try to pick a  
solution that's easily extensible later. Therefore I propose a  
<function> within <source>.

Any comments?

johannes