I was reading through Indiana University’s answer to the University of California’s future-of-cataloguing doc (grotty Word doc) when I ran into a widely-repeated nostrum that I think is completely bogus requires further thought.
“Catalogers will create metadata in formats such as MODS, EAD, VRA Core, and TEI,” it says (page 11). Um. Yeah. One of these things is not like the others. One of these things is not the same.
TEI contains metadata, as librarians and even cataloguers generally understand metadata, in the so-called “TEI header.” The bulk of TEI, however, is not metadata in that sense. It’s document markup, is what it is. It’s closer to editing or book design or typesetting than to cataloguing. You can’t do it just by examining the title page.
This isn’t to say that cataloguers can’t learn to do TEI. Of course they can; doubtless they can do TEI immensely better than I do MARC. But if they think working with TEI is going to be like working with MARC, they seriously need to rethink. It’s just a completely different beast.
