5. Author/Title, <msContents> pt. 2 The <author> element contains the name of the person with primary responsibility for a bibliographic unit. The content of this element is determined by the cataloguer and may or may not match the content of the medieval designation of author as contained in the rubric. It is, however, of singular importance in the indexing or searching for authors, and thus should be assigned with care, possibly with some attention to other catalogues or similar authority sources. The author may be formally anonymous, and encoded as such; the element may also define a collective authorship, if the work emanated from a council, or other such body. The element is repeatable, for the situations when one work has more than one individual author. The "reg" attribute can be used to give a regularized form of the author's name, for purposes of indexing or searching. Two of the attributes of <author> address the issue of the possible discrepancy between author as cited in the manuscript and current scholarship: "attested" and "accepted." Both have closed lists of values; neither has a default value. The values of the attribute "attested" are: "yes" (meaning that the attribution of authorship is attested in the manuscript); "added" (meaning that the attribution of authorship has been added in the manuscript by a later hand); "no" (meaning that the attribution of authorship is not attested in the manuscript); and "unk" (when the attestation of authorship is unknown). The attribute "accepted" carries four possible values: "a" (that the scholarly community recognzies that the attribution of authorship is precisely that: an attribution, and nothing more); "y" (that the attribution is generally accepted as true); "n" (that the attribution is generally accepted as false); "u" (that no claim is made about the validity of the attribution). Examples:
The <name> element contains a proper noun or noun phrase. While the <author> element is reserved for the person with primary bibliographic responsibility, the <name> element is used for all other early (i.e. ancient, medieval or renaissance) citations of individuals, corporate bodies, or places in the manuscript. It is used for the crucial function of indexing or searching, thus its contents should be constructed with the greatest care and consistency. This function is aided by several of the attributes on <name> of which the primary "type" with a closed list of values: person (which is the default value); female; place; org (for "organization"); other (for "other" unspecified types). As usual, the "reg" attribute allows for regularized forms of the name. In addition, the present work also defines a "role" attribute to specify the multifarious functions that the "named" person or organization might play in the life of the manuscript. Possible roles are: artist; annotator; atelier; binder; bindery; bookseller; compiler; glossator; dedicatee; patron; owner; translator. Examples:
<title> contains the word or words that identify a given work by a name that may be specific to that work or conventional. The content of this element is determined by the cataloguer and may or may not match the content of the medieval designation of title as contained in the rubric. It is, however, of singular importance in the indexing or searching for titles, and thus should be assigned with care, possibly with some attention to other catalogues or similar authority sources. Associated with the <title> element is a "type" attribute that can be used to distinguish two variations of uniform titles: distinctive, and generic. "Distinctive" refers to a title that is specific to a work, while "generic" is a conventional indication of the work, perhaps more correctly applied to a group, but taken here as an instance of the group. The distinction between distinctive and generic will have implications on the choice of font to be specified in a style sheet. The element <title> encodes both the medieval titles (which will be subject to indexing or searching) and the titles of modern secondary sources, which are usually not indexed. All <author> + <title> elements that are direct children of <msItem> will be considered "early" and indexed as such; the primary occupants of this slot are the entries in census or inventory-like catalogues. In fuller catalogues, the authors and titles from early times are more likely to be part of a bibliographic citation. Therefore, in order to distinguish these bibliograpic entries from entries containing more recent bibliography, use <bibl>'s "type" attribute with the appropriate value: "early" (standing for ancient, medieval, or renaissance) to indicated broadly an author or title that should be indexed/searchable in the present context; use the value "modern" for the full range of early modern, and modern studies, editions, articles and so forth that are not normally indexed/ searched in a catalogue of medieval and renaissance manuscripts. Consistent use of the values, "early" or "modern" on <bibl>'s "type" attribute, will in fact allow searching in either category. Especially when encoding legacy data, the titles as cited in the catalogue may vary in form and language; in this situation, use the subelement <orig> with its "reg" attribute to propose a uniform title. Remember that <orig>'s regularized form should omit the opening definite or indefinite articles, so that the title will alphabetize on its first indexable word, not on its initial stopwords. Note: The standard TEI "level" attribute with its closed list of values for analytic, monograph, journal, serial, or unpublished will presumably not be used for titles of medieval or renaissance works, but will be reserved for modern titles, with implications for their rendering in print. Note: Abbreviated titles, more common to modern secondary sources than to medieval titles, may be encoded via the standard TEI element, <ref>, with a pointer to the full citation in the bibliography. This is the case both of the sources cited by shortened title (such as PL, IMEV, RH, etc.) and of the sources cited by author name (such as de Ricci, Goff, etc.) Note: The attribute "lang" refers to the language used in the content of that particular element. The element <langUsage> refers to the language of the description, rather than the language of the text being described. See the documentation on <textLang> for this latter purpose. Examples:
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