Hi Mike, I'm pretty comfortable with METS, but very new to TEI. So, what I write here is just an attempt to reflect what my more experienced colleagues are saying:
* It seems the structure of TEI documents can be problematic since they follow a logical structure, by paragraphs/sections. And the structMap of all our METS documents, so far, are divided up by pages of text, not paragraphs. So the TEI structure does not fit nicely into METS the way we're using METS. * We're also concerned with not having redundant metadata in the TEI header and the dmdSec of the METS document. So, we're considering keeping the TEI header very brief and relying on the METS doc for descriptive/administrative/technical metadata. (We won't be deriving METS from TEI which is another issue.) * The other issue has already been raised by Liza Daly: performance. We've been told by one of the programmers at Mark Logic that we should embed the TEI docs into METS for good performance, but we have other reasons why we don't want to embed the TEI (editing, maintenance, etc.). So, we are considering writing a script that would integrate the METS and TEI at the point a search is deployed. * From the metadata standpoint, I want to keep the TEI docs separate and link out to them from the METS docs, because I'm not convinced that library metadata standards are stable. If we move away from using METS in the next 5-10 years, I think it would be easier if all the text/image files remained separate from the metadata. So, I'd prefer links in the fileSec of METS that link out to external TEI files. Chris On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Michael J. Giarlo < leftw...@alumni.rutgers.edu> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 14:38, stuart yeates <stuart.yea...@vuw.ac.nz> > wrote: > > Christine Schwartz wrote: > > > >> Should we consider embedding the TEI in the METS documents, or just link > >> out > >> to them? > > > > It depends on what you're doing and who the likely users of the METS are. > > > > The trouble with separate files, is that they inevitably get separated. > > Not to threadjack, but I am curious, Christine: how would you handle > linking between the TEI and the METS? > > It could be there's an obvious answer and I'm having a "duh" moment > (or lifetime), of course. > > -Mike >
