The TEI header is one of the few mandatory elements in a TEI
document. It has four major divisions which together provide a detailed
syntax for the documentation of:
The first of these, the file description, contains
traditional bibliographic material, detailing title, intellectual
responsibility and publication or distribution information relating to
an electronic text, which can readily be translated into a conventional
catalogue record for use by the growing number of forward-thinking
academic and public libraries now coming to terms with their new role as
curators of non-print electronic materials.
Several commentators, noticing how the day to day information
processing of all sectors of the economy now takes place in electronic
form only, have expressed concern at the difficulties faced by
librarians and archivists in handling these new forms of historical
records. Others, trying to come to terms with the wealth of information
in ``cyberspace'', have lamented the absence of any effective
cataloguing standards for networked resources and other forms of
electronic publication. For creators of language corpora, the provision
of such meta-descriptive information is essential, since without it
analysis of the full complexity of language use is all but impossible.
The TEI Header represents a major contribution to overcoming all these
problems.
Many electronic texts are essentially derivative works, created
either by keying or scanning previously existing print materials,
combining or modifying previously existing electronic materials, or
both. The source description part of the TEI header
allows an encoder to specify the source or sources from which a text has
been derived, using traditional bibliographic concepts. The pedigree of
a TEI-conformant text can thus be specified, in the same way as a
conventional book will generally document its publishing history. A
detailed formal description of changes made in producing a text can be
recorded as a distinct revision history ; this is
particularly useful for highly dynamic texts.
As noted above, the TEI is not a fixed encoding scheme, but offers a
variety of options appropriate to different situations. Consequently,
the encoding description within a TEI Header is of
particular importance to users of an electronic document. It provides,
in structured or unstructured form, vital information about editorial
conventions or policies, design decisions and even the selection of tags
actually used within the document.
The profile description is used to group together a
wide range of additional descriptive information ranging from
specifications of the languages used within it, the situation or social
context in which it was produced, its topics or classification, to
demographic or social characteristics of its authors or participants.
No-one is likely to need all of these categories of information, but
all of them are likely to be essential to some users.
A collection of TEI headers can also be regarded as a distinct
document, and an auxiliary DTD is provided to support interchange of
headers alone, for example between libraries or archives.
4.1 Elements available to all bases
The core tag set common to all TEI documents provides means of
encoding with a reasonable degree of sophistication such textual
features as typographically highlighted or quoted
phrases, (optionally distinguishing highlighting used
for emphasis, technical terms, foreign words, titles etc);
quoted phrases, (optionally distinguishing amongst direct speech,
quotation, glosses, cited phrases etc.);
``data-like'' phrases such as
names, numbers and measures, dates and times, etc.;
lists of all kinds;
basic editorial changes (e.g. correction of apparent errors;
regularization and normalization; additions, deletions and omissions);
simple links and cross references, providing basic hypertextual
features; facilities for annotation, indexing, bibliographic citations
and referencing systems.
There are few documents which do not exhibit some of these
features; and none of these features is particularly restricted to any
one kind of document. In some cases, an additional tagset is also
available, providing more specialized elements for those wishing to
encode aspects of these features in greater detail (for example, for
verse and drama, and for names), but the elements defined in this core
are believed to be adequate for most applications most of the time. 4.2 The header
The TEI scheme attaches particular importance to the provision of
documentary or bibliographic information about electronic texts. Such
information is essential for any satisfactory interchange of texts
coming from multiple sources, or for which long term uses are envisaged.
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