Dear Peter, dear all,

I'd second Arianna's vote and am in favour of broadening the definition
of msPart in order to include distinct manuscript parts which form a
virtual reunified manuscript.

In that case "the virtual manuscript" would have only
msIdentifier/msName as identification whereas the parts would be listed
with fully-fledged msPart/msIdentifier.

Additionally, it might be sufficient to have
msDesc/physDesc/objectDesc/@form='virtual' to make clear the relation
among the top-level msParts.

Best, Torsten


Am 13.03.2015 um 10:34 schrieb Peter Stadler:
> Dear all,
> 
> the TEI Council is seeking advice for the following issue:
> 
> We are lacking a mechanism to describe physically dispersed text-bearing objects (which formerly were parts of a single physical object) as one logical object. 
> Currently, the guidelines indicate the usage of <altIdentifier> for ‘scattered’ manuscripts [1] which seems not very convincing. A feature request was made for redefining the semantics of <msPart> [2] to include the case of scattered manuscripts. (At present, <msPart> is only defined to "contain information about an originally distinct manuscript or part of a manuscript, now forming part of a composite manuscript“ [3]).
> Another proposed solution is to add a new dedicated element <msFrag> (or whatever name …) which would behave pretty much like <msPart> (in terms of content and context).
> 
> So, the choice is between 1) broadening the definition of <msPart> so that it can cover not only parts of a manuscript which were originally independent and later gathered together, but also parts of a manuscript which was originally whole but is now in fragments; and 2) creating a new element, <msFrag>, for the latter case.
> 
> Any comments appreciated!
> Many thanks and
> all the best
> Peter
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html#msid
> [2] https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/505/
> [3] http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-msPart.html
> 


-- 
Torsten Schassan
Digitale Editionen
Abteilung Handschriften und Sondersammlungen
Herzog August Bibliothek, Postfach 1364, D-38299 Wolfenbuettel
Tel.: +49-5331-808-130 (Fax -165), schassan {at} hab.de

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