QA In The Construction Of A TEI Header

Background

Since the TEI header is still a relatively recent development, there has been a lack of clear guidelines as to its implementation; with the result that metadata has tended to be poor and sometimes erroneous. The implementation of a standard approach to metadata will improve the quality of data and increase the likelihood of locating relevant information.

Structure of a TEI header

The TEI header has a well-defined structure that may provide information analogous to that of a title page for printed text. The <teiHeader> element contains four major components:

1. FileDesc: The mandatory <fileDesc> element contains a full bibliographic description of an electronic file.
2. EncodingDesc: The <encodingDesc> element details the relationship between the electronic text and the source (or sources) from which it was derived. Its use is highly recommended.
3. ProfileDesc: The <profileDesc> element provides a detailed description of any non-bibliographic aspects of a text. Specifically the languages and sublanguages used, the situation in which it was produced, or the participants and their setting.
4. RevisionDesc: The <revisionDesc> element provides a change log in which each change made to a text may be recorded. The log may be recorded as a sequence of <change> elements each of which contains a corpus or collection of texts, that share many characteristics, or you may use one header for the corpus and individual headers for each component of the corpus.

A corpus or collection of texts, which share many characteristics, may have one header for the corpus and individual headers for each component of the corpus. In this case the type attribute indicates the type of header. For example, <teiHeader type-"corpus"> indicates the header for corpus-level information.

Some of the header elements contain running prose that consists of one or more <p>s. Others are grouped:

• Elements whose names end in S:nu (for statement) usually enclose a group of elements recording some structured information.
• Elements whose names end in Decl (for declaration) enclose information about specific encoding practices.
• Elements whose names end in Desc (for description) contain a prose description.

What Standards Should I Conform To?

The cataloguer should observe the Anglo-american cataloguing rules 2nd ed. (rev), AACR2, and the international standard bibliographic for electronic resources, ISBD (ER) when creating new headers. AACR2 is used in the Source Description of the header, which is primarily concerned with printed material, whereas ISBD (ER) is used more heavily in the rest of the File Description in which the electronic file is being described.

Further Information

• Documenting resources at the Oxford Text Archive, 2002, Colley, G and Anton S. Webb. 2nd Rev. ed.
• The Electronic Title Page, Text Encoding Initiative, 2002,
  <http://www.tei-c.org/Lite/U5-header.html>