Dear Luciana,
I fully agree with all the above. I would also stick with charters as documentary forms and with the digitized ones only, for the moment. However we could deal with dgitized analogue charters from medieval times to today rather than up to the 16th or 17th century, and we could use a language and a model capable of expansion rather than so focused on medieval and early modern material that it is impossible to use for contemporary material. We have invocations in todays charters, for example, such as "In the Name of the Republic or of the People", but if you call it "invocatio" it is not very useful. We have corroborations on every contemporary legal record, public and private. We have indeed all classic charters elements, like the formula perpetuitatis ("forever" in our documents), which we call perpetuity statement, but we have additional elements that only apply to contemporary records, and we should leave space for them by structuring the DTD in a way that can accommodate elements within categories. Even if the elements are expressed alphabetically, the categorization can be inherent in a code where the first part is the general element and the second is its manifestation. If we build the encoding this way, once we will eventually get to born digital documents, we will have dedicated conceptual areas where to include the additional elements. In some cases, the elements are already there. For example, if instead of regestum we call the corresponding element "profile", it accommodates both the regestum and the metadata schema (which the regestum really is).
Do you think, you could extract from the DTD a list of those elements (element names) which you feel uncomfortable with? Together with proposals for better names? Best, Patrick Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Projekt "Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierte Drucke" (zvdd) - http://www.zvdd.de Projekt "Online-Portal für digitalisierte Kulturgüter in Niedersachsen" (OPAL) - http://www.opal-niedersachsen.de Abteilung DD18 / RDD Papendiek 14 37073 Goettingen Tel.: +49 - (0)551 - 39-13789 Fax: +49 - (0)551 - 39-3856 sahle (at) sub.uni-goettingen.de Privat: Görlitzer Str. 18 37085 Göttingen +49 - (0)551 - 3709303 Sahle (at) uni-koeln.de