[It occurs to us that there may be some members of these mailing lists 
who would also be interested in the following mailing, which we 
therefore forward with the usual apologies for any duplicated postings]

Dear colleague,

This email is being sent to you because we think you are or were 
interested in using the MASTER dtd for marking up manuscript descriptions.

It's over ten years since Peter Robinson first organized a meeting at 
Studley Priory to discuss the possibility of developing an international 
standard for manuscript description. The work done by  the MASTER 
project which followed that meeting established a preliminary and highly 
influential candidate for such a standard. In the last  decade, the 
MASTER DTD or versions of it have been adopted by dozens of different 
manuscript cataloguing projects worldwide and the most recent version of 
the Text Encoding Initiatives P5 Guidelines is based  upon it.

The Manuscriptorium Project at the National Library of the Czech 
Republic (http://www.manuscriptorium.com/) is one of the largest 
European cataloguing projects based on the MASTER DTD.  We are now  
working on defining a new TEI P5 conformant schema for this system and 
also in developing conversion tools for existing records collections to 
be migrated to the new schema. This work is being done as part of the 
ENRICH (European Networking Resources and Information concerning 
Cultural Heritage) project, funded by the EU eContentPlus programme.

Part of the workplan involves a review of other MASTER-based systems, in 
an attempt to learn from their experiences, good or bad, in different 
contexts. We have set up a short online questionnaire for this purpose 
at http://tinyurl.com/yutq2r -- if you have ever used MASTER in some   
form, or simply considered using it, we very much hope you will be able 
to spare a little time to complete the questionnaire. It should  not 
take you more than 10 minutes.

We will be holding a special one day workshop to discuss the outcome of 
this survey at the University of Copenhagen at the end of February: if 
you would like to attend this meeting, please let us know. Please also 
feel free to pass this enquiry on to others you know of who might be 
interested.

With best wishes, and thanks in advance for your input

Lou Burnard (Oxford University)
Matthew Driscoll (Copenhagen University)