[MEI-L] Release of MEI 2013

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear MEI Community,

this week, we had a very productive conference at the Mainz Academy for Sciences and Literature, which was generally perceived as the MEI Members Meeting – a title which officially wasn't assigned. While I'm sure others may be better suited to report on the conference itself, I would like to repeat an announcement made during the conference for those of us that couldn't make it to Mainz.   

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We are happy to announce the release of MEI2013, a new iteration of our data framework. The release is available from http://music-encoding.org/downloads/mei2013 or the development repository at https://code.google.com/p/music-encoding/. The most distinct new feature is the implementation of FRBR, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. This model allows an easier alignment with state-of-the-art bibliographic data, but also opens new perspectives for scholarly editions. The merMEId tool developed by Siegfried Lundberg and Axel Teich Geertinger in Copenhagen, which they have announced several weeks ago on this list, already makes excellent use of this new module. 

With this new release, we also revised our website http://music.encoding.org to reflect all related changes. Most notably, this includes an online version of the Guidelines (http://music.encoding.org/documentation/guidelines2013), and a Sample Collection (http://music.encoding.org/documentation/samples) providing a set of about 150 MEI files conforming to either the 2012 or 2013 release. Most of these files are joined by a PDF with images of the underlying source and illustrate manifold aspects of MEI. However, this is intended to be an open collection, containing MEI instances from various origins. So if you happen to have an encoding of MEI at hand that you would be happy to share, please get in touch. There is also a search function available, which currently offers to search within certain metadata of the collection. The expansion of this functionality will be one of the major tasks for the upcoming months.

A big thank goes to the MEI Technical Team for preparing this release. While many people have helped, let me explicitly mention Axel Teich Geertinger, who did a great job on the development, testing and documentation of the new FRBR module. I would also like to emphasize the contribution of Maja Hartwig and Kristina Richts, who did a great job on the sample collection, providing another great resource for getting in touch with MEI. Thank you ever so much. 

Best regards from Mainz,
Johannes