Feedback from Janette, Lianne, Donna

[PhilReedData]

General points

As a shareable teaching workshop with actual TEI metadata and images from UoM special collections it offers an invaluable resource. It is designed to be delivered as a series of 3 workshops led by an instructor who has a good grasp of TEI and XML.

Lianne, Donna and I tested it to see if it could work as an online resource in which members of SC could work through remotely on their own.

We concluded that the introduction section (with some tweak and additional explanation) could work as a standalone self-guided intro but that the other sections were too difficult. Section 2 would be understandable to curators confident in EAD, the final section which looked at Locus and manifests is highly specialist and probably only needed by metadata cataloguers and those involved in the ingest process into MDC

Curators familiar with EAD will find this fairly straightforward – others in the SC team will find it much more of a challenge

Overall we felt that its best suited to a workshop environment as when you get stuck it’s very hard to progress and stay motivated on your own

Another barrier was working on a small laptop – quite difficult to see everything. Ideally two screens would make it easier so you can have Oxygen open on big screen and instructions on lap top. With one screen it gets tedious trying to go between the two. We also missed having paper copies, scissors and coloured pens!

We felt that the largest barrier would be familiarity and confidence in using an XML editor. We appreciate that the workshop is about TEI and can thus be used with any number of editors, but for our local SC audience the session needs to start with Oxygen. Perhaps send the TEI Latin Mss at the start and get people familiar with importing into Oxygen and talk through what they will see on screen and how it all works

Are there videos/quick start guides for Oxygen

We wondered about a series of screen shots – or having a video in which an instructor demonstrates how it works

Section by section comments

1 Introduction to TEI

• What is TEI?
• How is TEI constructed?
• How is TEI used?

Good clear explanations of what TEI is and how its used

Puzzle section – ideally you need a printer and to be able to cut it out. As a minimum you need to cut out the 10 tags that require placing on the screen (use blue tack/sellotape). Many of us won’t have a colour printer at home

Jargon busting section – we really liked that – especially the ‘boilerplate’! perhaps put jargon section earlier

Also really liked how you explain why we are using TEI and MDC, how it enables curator and academic to collaborate and how metadata can be readily shared and enhanced.

Link to Cambridge casebook project good – we need to inspire folk working through these workshops on their own. At times it felt a little dry and this is a problem with an online resource. In person the enthusiasm and energy of the workshop leader can keep everyone upbeat
Section on format specific schemas was useful – I learned a new word ‘epigraphic’

Useful that TEI was also a community and a set of guidelines – liked link to version 5

XML structure – homework part one

First hitch I encountered. ‘Save link as’ in Explorer it was ‘save target as’ sounds minor but it threw me

Also needed more text here as I saved my file but then I went straight on to the next instruction. Ie I didn’t navigate to file and then open in Oxygen and then go back to the instructions
Better and more detailed instructions during this exercise would be really helpful. It might be an idea to send the TEI file to our workshop attendees in advance and tell them to create a TEI folder that they can readily navigate to.

We also felt that screen shots would massively help with this section – so that the attendee would know what it looked like in Oxygen. The instructions were not intuitive or clear. Another way around could be a video of the instructor demonstrating the actions with a voice over.
Finding Msdesc was not easy the first time I tried. Screenshots and better instructions needed
Finding the 5 nested elements was fine once you had clicked on MdDec and it had gone blue on the central section of screen

Here working on a small laptop was gruelling – 2 screen set up would be much better

SOLUTION – currently empty, no answers. This needs adding. We all thought that it was better to give the answers here than at the start of the next workshop

We liked the key points recap section – more of these

Homework XML content, elements and attributes

Again the solution section is empty – again we think it should be here and not at the start of the next workshop

We were able to work through this fine and learned some useful things

2 Elements and Attributes

• How do I mark up a description?
• How do I validate my markup?

The curators in the testing group thought this section was fine and we were able to work through it. We thought it would be better in a class room setting. We particularly missed not having a printer and coloured highlighters to hand.

Perhaps the trick and tips for using Oxygen could be introduced earlier – at least some of it could go into first section. It felt like it arrived too late.

Key points – currently a draft version so need some work but we liked idea of reinforcing what are the key points for this section.

3 Descriptions and Cataloguing

• How do you mark up a locus?
• How do you link a locus?
• How do manifests work?
• How do I select and use authorities, and why should I use them?

This section was highly specialist and it seemed unlikely that anyone at SC UoM would need to know it beyond the metadata cataloguers and the staff involved in transferring files into MDC.
So I am sorry we stopped at section two

Having looked through it We did find it useful to know what locus are and why we need manifests