Conference Agenda

Clemens Gubsch (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna),
Kristina

Richts-Matthaei (Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz),
Severin Kolb & Matthias

Richter (Dresden State and University Library, Dresden)

The comprehensive and standardized gathering of metadata within MEI plays a

crucial role in various application scenarios, serving as a key factor in rendering

research data in an easily searchable, reusable, and archivable way. Whether

applied to music editions or work catalogues, essential and specific meta-information

related to composers, works, and performances is consistently collected and

subsequently presented online for users. This collaborative workshop aims to equip

participants with fundamental understanding of metadata encoding in MEI.

Theoretical concepts, including the use of FRBR and the incorporation of standard

data, are elucidated, along with an exploration of the diverse components within the

MEI header. Data entry will be evaluated across various application scenarios,

focusing on selected works and manuscripts: In a first step, the participants should

encode the given metadata manually. Different input editors are employed to provide

users with insight into available applications and help them determine the one that

best suits their project-specific requirements:

The three applications are:

● [Hands-On]:MerMEId (The Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data

[MerMEId] is a tool offering a web interface for the editing of MEI metadata,

developed by The Danish Centre for Music Editing in Copenhagen. Since the

end of 2019, MerMEId has been maintained and further developed as a

community project by several institutions [ZenMEM, ÖAW, Oxford University]).

● [Hands-On]: WizKit (Environment for editing MEI metadata in oXygen XML

Editor using oXygenForms to generate MEI-metadata. Developed by the

ÖAW in 2023, WizKit allows users to display the entered data as static html

via browser without having to resort to a larger technical infrastructure)

● [Showcase:] Muscat (central cataloging program for musical sources for RISM

catalog. Open-source-Software developed by RISM Digital Center)

The possibilities for entering MEI metadata – all the information that can be stored in

– can become very unmanageable, especially for beginners. All three

editors are used both to create metadata for already existing music encodings and to

structure and manage more extensive data sets such as work catalogues, sources

and performances as uniformly as possible. All input masks have their advantages

and disadvantages, but nevertheless generate more structured data than is possible

with manual encoding.