TEI Header and its Components TEI Guidelines

  • <filedesc>

  • <profiledesc>

  • <revisiondesc>
  • example/template
  • A <teiHeader> supplies the descriptive and declarative information making up an "electronic title page" prefixed to every TEI-conformant text. Attributes include: type which specifies the kind of document to which the header is attached. PLEASE USE THE TEMPLATE ON THE ANONYMOUS FTP SITE ON JEFFERSON FOR NEW DOCUMENTS. FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF INDIVIDUAL COMPONENTS IN THE HEADER, READ ON. The <teiHeader> has three principal components (each of which is described in greater detail in the sections which follow):

    <filedesc> contains a full bibliographic description of an electronic file
    <profiledesc> provides a detailed description of non-bibliographic aspects of a text, specifically the situation in which it was produced, the participants, and their setting
    <revisiondesc> summarizes the revision history for a file

    Example:

    <tei.2 id="uva.00023" type="doc">
    <teiheader type="text">
    <filedesc></filedesc>
    <profiledesc></profiledesc>
    <revisiondesc></revisiondesc>
    </teiheader>


    File description <filedesc>: TEI Guidelines

    This should contain the following components:

  • Title statement <titlestmt>: This section should include the <title> given to the electronic work (see the section on titling in another section of these guidelines), information about those "responsible" for the text <respstmt> and the name of the project's <funder>. <respstmt> contains a specific responsibility <resp> and the name <name> of the individual who performed it. To avoid ambiguity, use a separate <respstmt> for each task. (Fpr more information look at posts dated 15 March 2002 and 2 April 2002 in the email log. An example in which title is given by Whitman:

  • <titlestmt>
    <title level="m" type="main">Song of Myself</title>
    <title level="m" type="sub">a machine readable transcription</title>
    <respstmt>
    <resp>Transcribed by </resp>
    <name> Kenneth M. Price</name>
    </respstmt>
    <respstmt>
    <resp>Encoded by </resp>
    <name>Alice Rutkowski</name>
    </respstmt>
    <funder>The National Endowment for the Humanities</funder>
    </titlestmt>

    Example of ms. for which we have assigned a title (for the guidelines for assigning titles, click here.):

    <titlestmt>
    <title level="m" type="main" rend="bracketed">I see who you are</title>
    <title level="m" type="sub">a machine readable transcription</title>
    . . .
    </titlestmt>
    etc.

    Note that a rend attribute has been assigned to the title element to indicate that it has been supplied by us and should therefore be displayed with brackets.

  • Edition<editionstmt>: the date is included here
    Example:

    <editionstmt> <edition>
    <date>2000</date>
    </edition><
    /editionstmt>

  • Publication<publicationstmt>: includes the unique id number <idno>, distributor <distributor>, address <address>, and rights and availability <availability>.
    Example:

    <publicationstmt>
    <idno>uva.00023</idno>
    <distributor>The Walt Whitman Archive</distributor>
    <address>
    <addrline>The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities</addrline>
    <addrline>Alderman Library</addrline>
    <addrline>University of Virginia</addrline>
    <addrline>P.O. Box 400115</addrline>
    <addrline>Charlottesville, VA 22904-4115</addrline>
    <addrline>whitman@jefferson.village.virginia.edu</addrline>
    </address>
    <availability>
    Copyright © 2002 by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, all rights reserved. Items in the Archive may be shared in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Redistribution or republication on other terms, in any medium, requires express written consent from the editors and advance notification of the publisher, The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Permission to reproduce the graphic images in this archive has been granted by the owners of the originals for this publication only.
    </availability>
    </publicationstmt>

  • Source<sourcedesc>: this is a bibliographic description of the copy text(s) from which the present electronic text is being derived or generated.
    Example:

    <sourcedesc>
    <bibl>
    <author>Walt Whitman</author>
    <title>Calamus Leaves</title>
    <orgname type="repository">Valentine-Barrett Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia </orgname>
    <idno type="callno">3829</idno>
    <note>Transcribed from Joel Myerson, ed. The Walt Whitman Archive I: Whitman Manuscripts at the Library of Congress, New York: Garland, 1993, Part I: 134; Major American Authors on Cd-Rom: Walt Whitman, Westport, Ct.: Primary Source Media, 1997; our own digital image of original manuscript.</note>
    </bibl>
    </sourcedesc>

  • Notes on description of source: Because this information is about the copy text, the <title> here (as opposed to the one in titlestmt) should contain the exact title used by the library or other institution cited in <orgname>, no matter how imprecise or wrong-headed their conventions may seem. Many times, this will be the title given to a folder, since libraries often don't assign titles to each individual item.

    So far we have tended to work from Joel Myerson's facsmile reproductions of Whitman manuscripts (Garland), or the Primary Source Media Whitman CD, or from digital images of the manuscripts that we've procured one way or another. Whatever you use should be cited in <note>, and if you rely on more than one thing, mention everything you use, separated by semicolons. Please note that when citing Myerson, the volume #, part #, and page# may all of course be subject to change, poem by poem. Language for citing the CD and digital images should follow the example above.

    At the end, we say "our own digital image" rather than, say, the Whitman Archive's digital image so as to avoid any confusion with Myerson's volume, also called--somewhat unfortunately--the Whitman Archive.

    Note on <idno>: In the example, the only <idno> given is a call number, but often mss have no call number, but are archived according to various practices particular to different libraries. Also, often, there are multiple identification numbers, often a box # and a folder #, for instance. Some rules for what to include here: This is what will display with the document and just needs to give the user the basic information needed to find that item, if s/he actually wanted to go to that particular library and get it. Remember, we're NOT doing EAD within our transcriptions, so all you really need to give is the level of detail provided in the holding institution's on-line catalog. That said, you certainly can use two <idno> tags if necessary--for example, <idno type="box">47</idno><idno type="folder">36</idno>.

    Revision Description <revisiondesc>: TEI Guidelines

    The place to summarize the work we've done. In this section you can specify the changes you've made <item>, note when you made them <date>, and claim responsibility for the changes <resp>. IMPORTANT: TEI only allows one <item> per <change>. If changes are performed at the same time, add additional changes within the same <item> and use semicolons. If changes are performed at different times, add another <change> at the top, so that changes are listed in reverse chronological order (most recent change first). To describe the tasks in our routine workflow, choose from the following terms for the content of <item>: transcribed, encoded, edited, parsed, blessed. If the task is in addition to these, any descriptive phrase can be used.

    Example:

    <revisiondesc>
    <change>
    <date>2002-09-14</date>
    <item>Edited</item>
    <respstmt>
    <name>Ken Price</name>
    <name>Andy Jewell</name>
    </respstmt>
    </change>
    <change>
    <date>2000-08-22</date>
    <item>Transcribed; encoded</item>
    <respstmt>
    <name>Matt Miller</name>
    </respstmt>
    </change>
    </revisiondesc>

    example/template

    The following template is also available on the anonymous jefferson FTP site under /pub/whitman/epicinstall/whitman. For a text version of this template, click here.