This repository is primarily the location of the schema used by various manuscript catalogues, including union catalogues of collections at multiple institutions (Fihrist and Senmai) and catalogues of collections held at the University of Oxford (for Medieval, Hebrew, Genizah, Georgian, Armenian, and Tibetan.)
The schema is a customized version of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) P5 standard. The master copy is msdesc.odd, written in TEI's own ODD schema language. That has been converted into schema formats which XML editors and validating parsers can understand. The msdesc.rng RELAX NG file is the definitive version, but alternatives are also provided.
The direct URLs for validating (e.g. to paste into an xml-model declaration or to point an XML editor like Oxygen XML at) are:
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/msdesc/consolidated-tei-schema/master/msdesc.rng
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/msdesc/consolidated-tei-schema/master/alternatives/msdesc.xsd
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/msdesc/consolidated-tei-schema/master/alternatives/msdesc.dtd
Also provided is documentation, including details of the customization and guidelines for people using it to encode manuscript descriptions. HTML and PDF versions are available (generated from the ODD file.)
The repository also contains templates that may be used as starting points by cataloguers. template.xml is for manuscripts comprising a single codicological unit, and template-msPart.xml is for manuscripts comprising more than one codicological unit. Both are also provided in simplified forms that may be more suitable for beginning cataloguers and teaching use.
Finally, this repository is additionally the location for library files used by XSL and XQuery scripts in the catalogue repositories to process the TEI (e.g. converting into HTML, generating indexes for Blacklight-based web sites.