Article on TEI P5 development and use in frame of ENRICH project by James Cummings and Lou Burnard, Oxford University
There are several quite distinct traditions for the description of primary sources, in particular manuscripts. Unlike books, such sources are unique objects, often of great cultural value, which are typically catalogued locally by the many different institutions holding them. This contributes further to the diversity of approaches taken. Great institutions are able to produce richly detailed, highly scholarly descriptions, while smaller or less well-resourced institutions cannot hope to do so. But with the widespread increase in the practice of digitization of such primary sources, there is increasing pressure to make their cataloguing uniform, so as to facilitate cross-site searching, and the sharing of information about resources held at many different institutions.
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