Metadata/Indexing

A precondition for suitable indexing on page level was the development of normalized or standardized vocabulary for the description of early modern festival books. In collaboration with researchers in the field the HAB has worked out a structural pattern of this genre (cf. XML encoding) as well as a multilingual thesaurus containing terms for the description of elements of early modern festival books. In the current project the thesaurus has been enriched by new elements from the Warwick-project. Please bear in mind that not every thesaurus entry is matched by a hit in the database. By publishing the thesaurus on the web the HAB sought to provide a terminological framework for similar projects in the field.

The XML-based data model of the previous project for festivial descriptions and libretti (cf. the elements formerly used) was re-designed according to the TEI standard now widely established in the Humanities. Thus a concept was developed allowing a digital facsimile edition to be enhanced by adding structural metadata according to the TEI-DTD. The XML data from the previous project was tranformed into TEI by XSLT. This process went smoothly, as the project had adopted open XML standards right from the beginning.

The TEI-compatible XML files function as the basis for a) producing static HTML-pages (indexed by web crawlers), b) dynamically creating analytical tables of contents providing a survey of the book's structure and subjects as well as connecting index entries to the images and c) creating a database allowing complex searches on the material.

The XML document imitates the structure of the imprint and enhances it by selected keywords. Some textual sections of relevance (e.g. headings, in libretti: lists of persons or roles, sceneries etc.) were transcribed. Short-title descriptions were extracted from the library's catalogue, enhanced by keywords such as festival event, place, central person and duration of the festival and added to the XML-files. When transformed to HTML a Dublin Core metadata set was automatically created.

At page level we primarily encoded semantic-structural elements. These are book material-related divisions like binding, fly leaf, or textual sections like dedications or cartels, or pictorial elements like illustrations. Festival elements named or treated in the various sections were encoded by using the TEI index-tag and linked to the image pertaining to them. We drew on the bilingual thesaurus of festival descriptions for this purpose. A good deal of the illustrations were indexed with Iconclass notations. Iconclass notations allow a search on the illustrations independent of language. By means of an Iconclass browser hierarchical searches can also be conducted according to the order classification.

XML Spy and Xmetal were employed as tools to enter and manipulate XML data. The SAXON's XSLT- engine served to create HTML pages and validate XML instances.