6 The TEI Header

The TEI header allows later users of the etexts you create to find out what the text is, who created the etext (i.e. you), and what source edition(s) you transcribed the etext from. In its full expansion, it also allows a full accounting of your transcription practice (did you correct typos silently? did you expand abbreviations? normalize spelling? etc.) and can also include a detailed characterization of the text itself (demographics of its author and audience, subject matter, genre, etc.) and a full change log, which is important for document management in large projects.

For bare-bones work, however, it's simplest to copy the following TEI header by rote, and replace the text in square brackets with appropriate information about the text being encoded. If the etext is not transcribed from a pre-existing source, but instead is being created in electronic form, the bibl tags within the sourceDesc element should be changed to p.

 
<teiHeader>
<fileDesc><titleStmt><title>
  [Put the title of the electronic text here.]
</title><publicationStmt><p>
  [Indicate who is publishing this electronic text (i.e. you).]
</p></publicationStmt><sourceDesc><bibl>
  [Indicate the source from which this etext is transcribed.]
</bibl></sourceDesc></fileDesc></teiHeader>

For example, the TEI header of the document you are reading looks like this:

 
<teiHeader>
<fileDesc><titleStmt><title>
Bare Bones TEI:  A Very Very Small Subset of the TEI Encoding Scheme
</title><publicationStmt><p>
Published electronically by the Text Encoding Initiative, Chicago and
Oxford, in 1994.
</p></publicationStmt><sourceDesc><p>
This text was created in electronic form.
</p></sourceDesc></fileDesc>
</teiHeader>

6.1 What You're Missing

[Not described here are facilities in the TEI header for

fuller bibliographic description of the electronic text (edition labels, series information, full indications of who is responsible for it, identification of publisher, distributors, restrictions on availability, price, etc.
fuller bibliographic description of the source, including identification of non-textual sources such as tape recordings
documentation of how the text was encoded: nature of the project, sampling policy for corpora, editorial practices, SGML tags used, recognition criteria for tags used, typical rendition of tags used (e.g. "unless otherwise indicated, terms in glossary lists are printed in italic and offset into the left margin"), documentation of specialized notations used for feature structure annotation, metrical analysis, or text-critical apparatus.
characterization of the text in non-bibliographic terms: when and how it was created, languages used, classification in some subject-matter or text-type taxonomy, demographic description of author (or of speakers in spoken materials)
change logs recording modifications to the electronic text

These facilities are all present in the full header; they may not all be defined in the TEI Lite tag set.]