Letters

Encoding letters on parchment or paper or whatever, written in ink or typed with a machine follows the same guidelines available for other manuscripts. It is suggested that the keyword Letter is used to mark these record as well as those which contain letters as part of the main or secondary contents. Saint Petersburg, Institut Vostočnyh Rukopisej Rossijskoj Akademii Nauk, IV Ef.92.1 is an example of such a letter being recorded in the database. Another case is a letter which is copied into a manuscript, which has no independent support, and is thus a secondary or main content according to the criteria to decide on that. In this case, the criteria for contents apply, and you might or not want to create a work record. If you do so, then give to that work record the keyword Letter to facilitate retrieval.

There might be cases where you need to split a work and a manuscript record, if, for example, a letter of which we do have the original is mentioned somewhere for its text and a work record has been created for it to point it. This is fine, and if and when we might end up having a record for the actual manuscript letter then we will have it and point to the work record as usual. If, for example, one of these letters is mentioned in a manuscript (another of the same letters?) and you want to refer to it, then you could do that directly to the manuscript record, with no need to create a work record.

This has NOTHING to do with Letters as a literary genre.

The transcription of the letter can be done following the normal Text encoding Guidelines.