For this week's first task, we have been presented with the following brief: “Imagine that you have 1,000 different MEI files that you would include in your GitHub repository. Think through the metadata elements that you think is most important for describing the music in your 1,000-song dataset.”
In this scenario, I would include the following metadata in the MEI header:
| File description of the notated pieces | title, composer, subtitle, arranger, encoder, date, file size, publisher name, publisher location, usage restrictions, source |
| Encoding description of the notated piece | project description, sampling declaration |
| Work description of the original pieces | title, composer, lyricists, tempo, key, date, location |
Besides the most basic metadata (title and composer), I decided to add file size information since it might be beneficial from an organisational perspective, for example, to determine the size of the online storage needed. As I did not author the musical content of the MEI file, both its original source and the name of the arranger were specified. In addition, I believed that including a sampling declaration is also very important and thus it was added. In the case of having 1000 files, it is possible that some files will be incomplete, so we need to specify which parts of the source text they contain, or which methods of sampling were used to create the collection. Lastly, elements describing the abstract aspects of the piece such as key and tempo were added as well. This could allow me, for example, to filter the works by tempo or key which might be very useful when working with a lot of files.
For the second task, the MEI file was modified according to my new schema. It can be previewed here. Some of the metadata was linked to the data found on existing authorities (MusicBrainz). The following metadata fields: title, composer, lyricists and geolocation were linked.