Most LEMDO editors, including DRE editors, will prepare a textual essay to accompany their text. We recommend that you follow the DRE Editorial Guidelines for the textual essay and capture in narrative form within this essay the relevant information about the manuscript: provenance, relation of your manuscript to other sources, binding, hands/scribes, and other information about the material text. Lists and tables within the narrative may be an effective additional way to convey some of the information. The textual essay is made available to readers as a discrete critical paratext in the edition.

The semi-diplomatic transcription of the manuscript will also contain some structured information in the <teiHeader> of the XML file, but LEMDO does not require specific information because different manuscripts will have different kinds of information available about them to encode. For instance, the date of the manuscript may not be certainly known, the provenance information might be unclear, or the scribe might be unknown. Furthermore, not all editions will need or want to encode all available information about a given manuscript, especially if it is well described in a library catalogue or scholarly resource. It is up to the anthology lead and the editor to decide how much codicographical or paleographical information to give and to determine what information will be the most useful for readers of the edition.

The manuscript description is part of your file’s source description (in the <sourceDesc> element). Add an <msDesc> element as a child of your <sourceDesc> element.

Use the <msIdentifier> (manuscript identifier) element to capture key information about where your source manuscript is located. To encode the manuscript identifier, add the <msIdentifier> element as a child of the <msDesc> element. Add appropriate child elements to the <msIdentifier> element to capture key information about the location of your source manuscript:

To encode the information, follow these steps:

A sample manuscript identifier would look like this:

We recommend not abbreviating the names of collections in <idno> ; for example, use Additional MS rather than Add. MS. Note: the placement of the abbreviation MS can vary according to repository (for instance, sometimes people cite BL Add. MS and sometimes people cite BL MS Add. for manuscripts in the British Library’s Additional collection); we recommend being consistent within anthologies.

If a manuscript has more than one number that identifies it, for instance, a catalogue number different from a manuscript number, use multiple <idno> element.¹

Following the manuscript identification in the header, encoders can choose to describe the contents of a manuscript using the <msContents> element. An <msContents> element must have at least one child <msItem> element. Some manuscripts will have only one item (say, a play); others, like British Library Egerton MS 1994, will have multiple items beyond a single play. It is up to the editor and anthology lead how much detail to include in <msContents> .

LEMDO tends to use just a few child elements inside <msItem> : <locus> , <author> , <title> , <note> , and <idno> . We do not currently disallow other elements but plan to constrain the element more strictly.

Here is a sample of how the first plays of BL Egerton MS 1994 would be encoded.

You are not required to offer a physical description of a manuscript. Anthology leads will decide the level of granularity of information they want you to offer and if that information belongs in the textual essay or in the <mcDesc> of your semi-diplomatic transcription (or both). If you and your anthology lead decide that it is appropriate to include a physical description in the <msDesc> , you will add a child <physDesc> element. Inside <physDesc> , you will add an <objectDesc> element. Your physical description goes inside a <p> element inside the <objectDesc> .

Information that can appear in the physical description includes: a description of the support (paper, vellum, etc.), watermarks, foliation, and/or condition. Currently, LEMDO does not use the full TEI tagset for describing manuscripts, so the information is offered in prose. You can also link to your own textual essay from the <objectDesc> Keep in mind that this XML file may travel on its own and be archived independently of the HTML edition. A few sentences will suffice. Make a link to your textual essay following the instructions in Encoding Links Between Parts of Your Edition for making links between parts of your edition.

LEMDO uses the <msDesc> (manuscript description) element to capture structured information about the source manuscript. The <msDesc> element has a rich array of child elements that make it easy to encode metadata and narrative information about where the manuscript is held and what the manuscript contains along with a physical description of the manuscript.

The manuscript description element ( <msDesc> ) is part of the source description ( <sourceDesc> ) in the TEI header. LEMDO has constrained the Manuscript Description module to the following elements: <collation> , <country> , <handDesc> , <institution> , <locus> , <msContents> , <msDesc> , <msIdentifier> , <msItem> , <msName> , <objectDesc> , <physDesc> , <repository> , <supportDesc> , and <typeDesc> . The only customization of those elements is that the value of the @resp on <physDesc> must point to a person in LEMDO’s personography (PERS1) or to an organization in LEMDO’s orgography (ORGS1). Experienced users of TEI may wish to read up on these elements in the Manuscript Description chapter of the TEI Guidelines. Anthology leads or editors may request that other elements from the Manuscript Description module be added to LEMDO’s schema; such requests will be reviewed by LEMDO’s Manuscript Consultant (Laura Estill) and LEMDO’s developers to ensure that we do not already have an encoding protocol to capture the information and to ensure that we have processing to handle a new element.

The contents of <msDesc> form a permanent part of the XML and HTML files of the semi-diplomatic transcription. They can also be processed in various ways. For example, the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project processes the <msDesc> values and text into a stand-alone, generated table included in each edition. See, for example, The Douai Twelfth Night: Manuscript Description.