Consuelo W Dutschke wrote:
> The TEI workgroup originally charged with producing the means for encoding the
> shelfmark (and all its appurtenances) planned on:
>
> <!ELEMENT msIdentifier
> (country | region | settlement | institution | repository
> | collection | idno | altName)+ >
>
> The reasoning was that much as one might like to have all this information,
> there are times when it simply is not available or is available in all
> too many ways:
>
The trouble with this content model is that it allows yuou to say (for
example) just the country repeatedly.
> --a manuscript sold at auction and now lost to view
> --a manuscript whose owner claims two legal residences (cf. the Schoeyen
> Collection, legally designated as London/Oslo)
> --a manuscript legally owned by more than one institution (the Newberry
> Library in Chicago that makes joint purchases with other libraries, e.g. that
> of Notre Dame)
> --a manuscript known to the encoder only by its nickname, "The Grimani
> Breviary" or known to scholarship by a nickname that refers to only its most
> important (??) aspect, e.g. "The Berlin Grosseteste" (as if there were only
> one manuscript of Grosseteste in Berlin, and as if there were only one
> repository).
>
>
The assumption beyond the current content model is that one will always,
at least, know be able to locate the physical location of the
manuscript, since a "manuscript" is defined as being a physical object
which must exist somewhere. Early on (in Master in fact, if I remember
aright) we discussed and rejected the idea of trying to use it catalogue
mss which didnt exist any more or which couldnt be seen. So, even in the
last case you suggest, one would have to know where the "Berlin
Grosseteste" is, or say "repository unknown".
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