PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THE USE OF TEI HEADERS IN A LARGE CORPUS

Many aspects of the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) a re applicable to corpora and text collections, and to the texts that t hese contain. As the first large corpus developed using mark-up confor ming to the guidelines, the British National Corpus (BNC) is a test-be d for many TEI-developed mechanisms. This is particularly true in the case of the TEI header, which has three intended applications - to des cribe a corpus, to describe an individual text, and as a free-standing bibliographic record - all of them used by the BNC. This paper descri bes the application of the TEI header to the BNC. It is intended that this information should, through a description of experience on a prac tical project, serve as a guide for those wishing to use TEI headers i n the documentation and management of other corpora and collections of texts.