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Standardized General Markup Language is a language for encoding data for long-term storage and retrieval. SGML is a universal standard that is not owned by any one hardware or software manufacturer.
SGML is the parent language of HTML (the language used to create web pages) and of XML, the projected new standard for web documents.
SGML works by constructing a template for encoding, called a Document Type Definition (DTD). All documents that have been 'marked up' in valid SGML must conform to a DTD. A DTD may be stored as a file and used to check and validate documents, and it can also be used to create forms for standardized data entry.
Visit The SGML/XML Web Page for more information.
The SGML Initiative will participate in the development of a DTD for encoding electronic catalog descriptions of medieval manuscripts. The DTD will provide a template for a simple, first-level description of a manuscript, and also permit encoding of more detailed information.
The SGML Initiative will then test the DTD at several libraries, including the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, and collect comments and suggestions about it from the scholarly community. After revising and improving the DTD, the Initiative will share it with libraries and archives everywhere.
The first step in creating the DTD has been completed. In November 1997 members of the EAMMS Descriptive Record Committee met in New York, together with representatives from two other Mellon-funded access projects, Columbia and Berkeley's Digital Scriptorium and Cornell University's SagaNet. The group succeeded in identifying the fields necessary for a first-level, summary description of a medieval manuscript. See the fields.
EAMMS's European partner project, MASTER (Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records) and the Manuscript Description Working Group of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) are creating the DTD that will be used to encode lengthy, detailed descriptions. This DTD is due to appear in March, 2000, and testing will begin soon after.
The director and staff of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library have decided to make catalog records of the 90,000 microfilms available to scholars electronically, over the World Wide Web. By encoding these records in SGML we hope to be able to store them more or less permanently and offer searchable access to them through current and future software programs. If our DTD is XML-compliant, our records will be accessible through the next generation of web browsers produced by Netscape and Microsoft.
Records for a few of the microfilms exist already in electronic form, but the majority of the first-level, inventory records are still on index cards only. The staff at HMML will work to create first-level electronic records for the entire collection before the arrival of the millenium.
Hill Museum & Manuscript Library SGML Initiative | © Copyright 2000 by HMML
URL: http://www.csbsju.edu/hmml/eamms/sgml_initiative.html
maintained by HMML | Last Revised
February 28, 2007