[MEI-L] Header data for Corpus monodicum

[TW]

Hi Perry,

thanks for your advice.  It's really valuable for me to get started.

2013/1/7 Roland, Perry (pdr4h) <pdr4h at eservices.virginia.edu>:
>
>> - Is it advisable to stick to "old" MEI when encoding information
>> about the source, or shall I go forward and adopt the FRBR way?
>
> There's no single, "correct" answer to this question.  It depends on the level of detail you want to capture and the complexity of the relationships you expect to find in the source materials.
>
> The so-called "old" MEI will continue to work for bibliographic and physical description of source material.  The use of <source> will still provide the capability of capturing basic bibliographic data, such as creator, title, physical description, language usage, inscriptions, watermarks, and so on.  What you don't get with the former method is the ability to --
>
>     - clearly express the fact that a manuscript has been broken into multiple pieces that are now housed in widely-separated locations (because using only <source> you can't formally separate the pieces of locational information from each other) and
>
>     - group multiple sources (usually by score format or performance medium) into something FRBR calls an "expression".
>
> I think you might want to start by supporting only <source> (and <work>, of course).  Adding <item>, <expression>, and the other elements that facilitate the markup of FRBR relationships, can come later.
>

That sounds like a good plan to follow.  As we'll usually describe one
source only, referring to the original manuscript and no other
expressions, this doesn't force us to use FRBR functionality.  Also,
the individual files will only contain rather short chants, and I
don't expect we'll have to deal with chants where the first few words
are found in Paris and the rest in Madrid.

>> - How can we sensibly record all those different numbers and genre titles?
>
> [... lot's of useful information about classification]


>> - Would it be useful--or is there any interest--to standardize how to
>> record header data specific to liturgical music, considering the
>> tremendous amount of sacred music in existence?
>
> It's tempting to provide special markup for the description of liturgical music, but where does that line of thought end?  If liturgical music, then why not chamber music or any number of other genres, sub-genres, sub-sub-genres, ad infinitum?  I think it's better to provide a single, general mechanism that applies across a wide range of situations, which can be made specific through the use of specialized controlled vocabularies.

Yes, I was more thinking of such a controlled vocabulary rather than
specialized markup (maybe things like this are already in existence; I
guess that's a question for librarians...).

> I'm not sure what you mean by "element number" so I can't address that item at the moment.
>

This is just kind of a running number that, among other things,
determines the order of appearance in the printed edition.

> One last piece of advice, if I may -- Please remember that there are professionals who are trained in the dirty details of these kinds of systems and decisions.  Kindly support your local librarian.  :-)
>

We should indeed do that.  I blame the fact that I'm too far away from
where the librarians local to the project reside that I didn't
consider this earlier.

> Hope this helps,
>

Yes, it does.  Herzlichen Dank!

Thomas