Changes june 2021

[andrew-morrison]

Both damage elements and defective attributes are used in other catalogues. Is the notation being added by the stylesheet specific to Medieval or universal?

There is nothing wrong with the XSLT syntax.

[holfordm]

Even within medieval Western catalogues, notation for these things varies, but I think this notation is universally comprehensible. Certainly the defective ttribute is just an extension of what we already have for incipit and explicit. Do we have colleagues from Fihrist or other catalogues on this repo who might comment?

[andrew-morrison]

Looking more closely, damage has been used by a couple of Fihrist institutions to mark up descriptions of damage in physDesc. For example:

• https://github.com/fihristorg/fihrist-mss/blob/master/collections/the%20university%20of%20manchester/Persian_MS_90.xml#L202
• https://github.com/fihristorg/fihrist-mss/blob/master/collections/wadham%20college%20(university%20of%20oxford)/WadhMinasian_708.xml#L76

You could add some context, so the new template only matches damage when inside certain other elements, but if the above are using it wrong it might be just as well to keep it as-is, to discourage further incorrect usage.

There are very little usage of rubric or finalRubric, and none with the defective attribute, but here's an example in Fihrist of the defective attribute in both incipit and explicit:

• https://github.com/fihristorg/fihrist-mss/blob/master/collections/oxford%20university/MS_S_Digby_Or_189.xml#L65-L69

Which is displayed like this:

• https://www.fihrist.org.uk/catalog/manuscript_12853

Alasdair created that record after the new Fihrist web site launched, so it would've displayed that way when he did so.

[holfordm]

The current guidelines are clear that it should be used for "an area of damage to the text witness." Extending that to use the element to describe the nature of damage to an object is perhaps logical but strictly should either be noted in our ODD or submitted to TEI council. (Can we pass this on to the Fihrist mailing list?)

[andrew-morrison]

I've sent an email to the Fihrist mailing list.

I've now merged this pull request. I don't create new releases for tweaks to the XSLT.