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MerMEId: Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data [Copenhagen, Denmark] : The National Library, Danish Centre for Music Publication, 2013-. http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/dcm/projekter/mermeid.html (Accessed 15 August 2014). [End-user access requires a Web browser (Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 18.0+, or Google Chrome 24.0+ recommended) and Internet access. Pricing: Freely distributed open-source software released under Apache License version 2.0.]
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...