Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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descriptions that provides scholarly <strong>in</strong>formation on “codicology, manuscript history and textual
transmission”; (5) a flexible data model that can accommodate the <strong>in</strong>tegration of “manuscript
descriptions” of vary<strong>in</strong>g semantic depth and length; and (6) l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g to important exist<strong>in</strong>g onl<strong>in</strong>e
resources such as library catalogs, specialist bibliographies, and digital texts. Deckers et al. (2009)
reported that they particularly wanted to create a tool that provides scholars <strong>in</strong> the fields of Greek
codicology and palaeography with the ability to publish digital research materials.
The Teuchos platform is built off of a Fedora repository. Three types of users can <strong>in</strong>teract with this
repository through a web application: 528 systems adm<strong>in</strong>istrators; registered users, who may contribute
resources; and public users, who can view only publicly released materials. The Teuchos Fedora
repository <strong>in</strong>cludes several types of complicated digital objects, all of which have been designed to try
and cover all potential categories of text transmission. Manuscript watermark trac<strong>in</strong>gs are stored as
digital images and <strong>in</strong>formation about them is stored <strong>in</strong> a custom XML format created by the project. A
“textual transmission” group has two subgroups, each of which is then subdivided: the first group
provides <strong>in</strong>formation related to <strong>in</strong>dividual manuscripts and the second <strong>in</strong>cludes <strong>in</strong>formation related to
<strong>in</strong>dividual works. With<strong>in</strong> the manuscript group, <strong>in</strong>dividual data objects <strong>in</strong>clude digital page images (of
complete or partial manuscripts) that are aggregated for each manuscript, codicological descriptions
that reference page images when available, and vary<strong>in</strong>g levels of transcription data. In terms of works,
this subgroup encompasses a wide range of materials referr<strong>in</strong>g “to a source text with its entire set of
manuscripts rather than to one particular witness” and <strong>in</strong>cludes full critical editions, translations, and
commentaries (Deckers et al. 2009). The three other major categories of digital object that are created
are biographical dictionaries, bibliographical data, and published research papers. Because of the
heterogeneous nature of these data, only the manuscript descriptions and transcriptions could be
encoded accord<strong>in</strong>g to TEI P5 XML.
Because the creators of Teuchos hope to provide scholars with advanced search<strong>in</strong>g and edit<strong>in</strong>g
functionality, they have developed a data model for both the physical and <strong>in</strong>tellectual content of
manuscripts <strong>in</strong> their platform. While not all of the descriptive material <strong>in</strong> Teuchos <strong>in</strong>cludes digital
images of manuscripts, all the digital images that are <strong>in</strong>cluded have accompany<strong>in</strong>g descriptive and
authority metadata. All manuscripts with digital images also have a correspond<strong>in</strong>g reference document
that makes use of the TEI element and a list of elements with unique identifiers
<strong>in</strong> the form of xml:id attributes and unambiguous labels for pages us<strong>in</strong>g the “n” attribute. The
elements are listed <strong>in</strong> the physical order of the manuscript, and miss<strong>in</strong>g pages are
represented with empty elements.
To facilitate user access to <strong>in</strong>dividual page images, Teuchos provides at least a m<strong>in</strong>imal transcription
for each manuscript (e.g., it may simply conta<strong>in</strong> page-break <strong>in</strong>formation and no textual transcription)
that conta<strong>in</strong>s structural <strong>in</strong>formation that “can be used to offer alternate representations and improved
navigation for brows<strong>in</strong>g, and to give a clearer <strong>in</strong>dication of the part of the text to which an image
viewed perta<strong>in</strong>s” (Deckers et al. 2009). These data are then encoded with<strong>in</strong> TEI elements.
While elements with “corresp” attributes that po<strong>in</strong>t to unique page identifiers are used to
reference digital images of <strong>in</strong>dividual manuscript pages, the element is used to separately encode
foliation or pag<strong>in</strong>ation <strong>in</strong>formation. This separate encod<strong>in</strong>g is important, Deckers et al. reported,
because it “permits record<strong>in</strong>g whether numbers provided by the transcriber are actually present on the
page or not” and also supports “record<strong>in</strong>g more than one such reference system,” a particularly
important issue, s<strong>in</strong>ce many manuscripts can have multiple foliation systems.
528 A beta version of this application is available at http://beta.teuchos.uni-hamburg.de/TeuchosWebUI/teuchos-web-ui