[MEI-L] Clarification of FRBR levels / source

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear MEI-L,

On various occasions, members of the MEI Community have expressed confusion that <workDesc> is a first-level child of <meiHead>, while <sourceDesc> is nested into <fileDesc>. This has historical reasons: Before the introduction of FRBR into MEI, <source> was used to describe both the material used in the preparation of the file, and sources (prints, manuscripts, …) for which there is an editorial interest of some kind. Sometimes, these two fell together, and sometimes they didn't. When implementing the FRBR model, these two use cases were not differentiated clearly. As such a change to the MEI model would clearly break backwards compatibility, and at the same time affect a great number of MEI instances, it seems good to not implement it in the upcoming MEI 4.0.0, but instead in a later revision of MEI. At the same time, MEI 4.0.0 could include a deprecation warning, giving users and developers sufficient room for discussing a potential solution and testing its consequences on their use of MEI.

This same message has been filed as an issue on the MEI GitHub account over at https://github.com/music-encoding/music-encoding/issues/546. Perry and I already started work on a potential solution. You're invited to join our discussion either here on MEI-L, or directly at GitHub. If you have a GitHub account, you can hit the "Watch"-button on that page and receive email-notifications whenever someone contributes to the GitHub issue.

All best,
jo
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