TEI encoding guidelines for cataloguers

TEI should always be referred to for definitions and use of elements and attributes.

These guidelines, however, are about the use of a schema which is largely customized. The customization is documented in the ODD (see schema view), but we also offer a more canonical version of every single file, which populates empty pointers and expands abbreviated URLs, for example.

However, TEI is not a prescriptive system or a schema, and the present guidelines describe the declension of the TEI for this project and its purposes. Whenever possible the reason for a particular encoding decision is given. This shall help also to track bugs related to data entry.

The ODD and the schema can be found in the Schema repository.

If you think something should be automatised, click here first.

There are several general things you are going to encode. These pages describing them are all a MUST READ if you are editing for the first time:

1. How to transliterate
2. How to record the activity done on any file
3. Adding a type to distinguish different entities
4. How to deal with white spaces.
5. General information in titleStmt
6. How to assign IDs
7. How to make links
8. How to deal with bibliography
9. Making statements about languages used in the file
10. Marking up Named Entities (personal names, place names, titles, dates)
11. Use of referencing attributes (@corresp and @ref)
12. <certainty>↗
13. Assigning keywords
14. Figures and links to images
15. Assigning an information to a specific source

After reading these you have to look at more specific guidelines for each type of file:

1. Manuscripts
2. Text Units
3. Places
4. Persons
5. Narrative Units
6. Repositories
7. Authority files
8. Art Themes
9. Corpora

When you are done with a file, please, add a <change>↗ with content completed (see revisions). If you have reviewed and corrected a file which is now ready and published, please add a change with content reviewed.

Please validate your data before pushing it to the public repositories and make sure only valid data is sent through.