![]() ![]() Illuminated elements are identified, and inscriptions in them are transcribed and/translated. ![]() Manuscript texts are identified, and rubrics and incipits to manuscript items transcribed. We made decisions, like this one, throughout the design of our manuscript cataloging practice that provided human friendly information and also took advantage of the TEI’s ability to encode structured information that computers can use to do things like group manuscripts by their dates of origin, or linguistic content, or to locate the images belonging to a cataloged folio. While it is possible to use multiple origDate elements for different calendars (Gregorian, Julian, Islamic, Hebrew, and so forth), for simplicity of data entry and consistency across western and Islamic manuscripts, we chose to use Gregorian years for the origin element and a single free text value for the origDate element. For Islamic world manuscripts, we use Common Era years for the attributes and and a text date that gives both the Islamic hijri and the Common Era Gregorian dates: Our practice was to collect numeric year values and a text value for the date of the manuscript. For example, the TEI element for the date a manuscript’s origin, origDate, accepts a free text as its content, and the element that contains it has XML attributes that express a single date, or a date range, and so that “early 10th Century C.E.” would be expressed thus: Use of the TEI has not shaped our cataloging goals or what data we collect, but rather has guided how that data is collected. Only a subset of TEI has been selected for the Walters manuscripts. TEI guidelines are broad and allow for the collection of extremely detailed manuscript descriptions. This ensures that our manuscript descriptions will be available to a wide range of users and can be rendered in multiple output formats (such as PDFs, HTML web pages, and page turning applications). We generate machine readable manuscript descriptions in XML format that comply with the TEI. ![]() The TEI is a widely used international standard for the encoding and description of texts and documents of many types. To ensure broad access to our manuscript descriptions and adherence to standards, the Walters has adopted the TEI P5 guidelines for its manuscript cataloging. ![]()
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