Via Language Log: The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria has, in an effort to draw more attention to TEI, chosen to prepare an encoded version of the lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and overlaid the resulting XML over the song's video. The resulting video is available, naturally, on YouTube.
ETCL's Ray Siemens writes about the reasoning behind this on the TEI Video Widgets blog:
At the last gathering of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, in Maryland, a few of us were discussing the ways in which TEI has eluded some specific types of social-cultural representation that are especially current today . . . things like an avatar, or something that could manifest itself as a youtube posting. A quick search of youtube did reveal a significant and strong presence of sorts, but it was that of Tei the Korean pop singer (pronounced, we're told, "˜tay'); so, our quest began there, setting out modestly to create a video widget that would balance T-E-I and Tei in the youtube world.
I understand why the MARC leader position 08 is a good idea in theory. In fact, MARBI Proposal 97-07 suggests:
a change in definition to Leader/08 code "a" for clarification; making code "t" (Manuscript language materials) obsolete in Leader/06 and using code "a" instead; redefinitions of codes "a" and "p" in Leader/06; renaming the 008 for Books to "Textual (Nonserial); and deleting field 006 for Mixed material.
I can safely say that some pretty funky stuff gets cataloged with the leader position 08 set as "a," and much of it is incorrect, at $MPOW and otherwise. What is Leader/08 actually supposed to be used for? MARBI Proposal 97-07 again states:
Code a indicates that the material is described according to archival descriptive rules, which focus on the contextual relationships between items and on their provenance rather than on bibliographic detail. The specific set of rules for description may be found in 040 $e. All forms of material can be controlled archivally.
The ICA's Committee of Best Practices and Standards released the first edition of the International Standard for Describing Functions (ISDF). Like much of ICA's other work in descriptive standards for archives, ISDF is designed to be used in conjunction with established standards such as ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF), as well as standards in preparation such as ISIAH. ISDF will assist both archivists and users to understand the contextual aspects of the creation of records of corporate bodies. Through ISDF and related standards, archivists will be able to develop improved descriptive systems that can be potentially implemented using a Linked Data model.
