[MEI-L] Current work on the Guidelines

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear MEI Council and other MEI-L subscribers,

it's been a (too) long time since our last report from the Technical Team. As you might remember, we're still preparing the upcoming release of MEI. Whereas the schema itself is already fixed, we're currently working on the guidelines for this release, which shall mimic the purpose and functionality of the TEI guidelines. 
We're already in the lucky position of having some text for almost every chapter (each chapter deals with one of MEI's modules). This was only possible with the help of Benjamin Bohl, Andrew Hankinson, Maja Hartwig, Laurent Pugin, Kristina Richts, Craig Sapp, Raffaele Viglianti, Thomas Weber and Perry Roland. Although we haven't finished it yet, I would like to thank all of them for their hard and continuous work on this. 

As you all know, collaboratively writing a text with ten authors leads to some differences, so right now Perry and me are reviewing those chapters and try to edit them as good as possible, while always staying in dialogue with the original authors. It is our plan to finish our review and have a first draft of the complete Guidelines by June 11th. Then, we would like to make that available to the subscribers of this list, which includes the whole MEI Council. We would ask you to have a thorough look at least to the chapters you're most interested in, and give us some feedback on it. Maybe we need to explain some features better, maybe you're missing an example for something, or maybe we did something completely wrong. All of this criticism will be helpful for us to improve the Guidelines. But: We don't have much time left for this release. Basically we offer you two weeks of time to review our draft (deadline: June 24th), and then we have the rest of June to work in as much as is possible. This means that we might not be able to react on fundamental criticism this time. but the Guidelines will probably stay a work in progress for the next few years – TEI hasn't finished work on theirs, and they started more than 25 years ago… Our plan is to have everything ready for release by the end of July. This includes the Guidelines, the schema, an updated website, and our sample collection of MEI files. 

If we want this to come true, we need your help. Please reserve some time to review the Guidelines in the two weeks starting on June 11th. Feel free to criticize everything you regard as improbable, but please forgive us if we can't react on everything you say. We will keep track on these issues and will regard them for the next revision of the Guidelines. If you have some time to work on the text on your own, we're happy to  introduce you to the technical workflows necessary. 

With best regards from the text smithery,
Johannes