MerMEId: Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data by The National Library, Danish Centre for Music Publication (review)

Introduction

In order to fully understand the purpose and utility of MerMEId, one needs to first understand the Music Encoding Initiative—or MEI—a standard upon which the tool was developed. Perry Roland, at the University of Virginia, began work on MEI in 1999 as a music-specific XML schema.¹ XML schemas define the content and structure of XML data used in a particular XML document, and MEI was created specifically for music XML data and metadata. The user-base for MEI has grown steadily over the years, with the latest version of the schema being released in 2013.

MEI is unique from other XML-encoded music notation schemas, and one chief difference is that MEI strives to not only fully represent music data (i.e., music notation), but it also provides an apparatus for robustly encoding a range of associated metadata. For example, if the encoding were a representation of a manuscript, the MEI metadata could conceivably include individually encoded information about the creator, extent, provenance, holding archive or institution, extant copies, and so on. Unfortunately, encoding XML, and by extension MEI, requires significant precision and expertise, so the challenge arises: How can one employ the full possibilities of MEI without needing to “touch” the XML directly?

Enter MerMEId

MerMEId (Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data) consists of an XML database that stores MEI-formed data and a Web browser-based interface that facilitates metadata editing. Under the aegis of the National Library of Denmark’s Danish Centre for Music Publication, the system was developed by Axel Teich Geertinger and Sigfrid Lundberg to aid in preparing a thematic catalog of the works of Carl Nielsen, a project which is encoded following the MEI schema.²

Interface

MerMEId has two interfaces: a Java application for uploading pre-existing MEI files and a Web-browser application for creating and editing MEI metadata. It would be ideal to have these two functions—uploading and creating/editing—combined into the Web application. Since the Java application is straightforward and actually part of another open-source software package, review of the interface will focus on the web application.

The Web application landing page (called the File List) presents the user with a listing of all the musical works contained in the shared MEI database and with the opportunity to create a new MEI metadata file.³ Here the user can search by keyword, limit by publication status and/or collection, and sort by composer, year, or work number.

Each line in the File List represents a musical work, and for each work a composer, title, and user-defined collection is displayed, when applicable. Clicking on an individual title in the listing will display, in HTML, the MEI metadata for that item. The range of metadata possibilities will be covered later as the editing interface is examined. This functionality is perhaps not as intuitive as it might be, and the mouseover tooltip simply says “View”, where “View Metadata” might be clearer. Next to each work in the File List is a series of hyper-linked icons that: displays the raw XML (both the data and metadata); opens the metadata editing interface; creates a copy of the file; publishes the file to a publicly accessible folder; and deletes the file. The aforementioned actions are predictable, with the possible exception of “publishing”—until the user reads the help documentation, it is not immediately evident what the publishing functionality entails.

The power of MerMEId lies in its metadata creation/editing interface. When in the interface, six tabs line the top of the page: Work, Music, Sources, History, Bibliography, and File. Selecting a tab brings...