Perspectives of the further development of the Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF)
Historical correspondences are generally only partially edited—focusing often on one person or only on the correspondence between two persons. Thus edited letters[1] remain isolated in the context of a certain scholarly edition. Searches across scholarly projects and editions are time-consuming and difficult.
To solve this problem[2], the Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF), based on the TEI Guidelines, was developed. With the help of the CMIF scholarly editions should be enabled to provide the metadata of their edited letters in a machine-readable way – online and under a free license. These files can be retrieved and processed by digital scholarly editions, databases or web services (like correspSearch).
This article presents the current state of the CMIF and outlines the possibilities of the further development. Interested scholars are invited to give feedback in the comment section below or on the mailing list of the TEI Correspondence SIG.
