Introduction
The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven effort to create a commonly-accepted, digital, symbolic representation of music notation documents. We strive to establish the design principles and the technological and representational requirements that will enable the discipline of musicology to take full advantage of digital technologies. We are working to provide guidelines and tools that can be widely used by libraries, museums, and individual scholars to encode musical scores for research, teaching, and preservation activities.
The MEI schema is a set of rules for recording the intellectual and physical characteristics of music notation documents so that the information contained in them may be searched, retrieved, displayed, and exchanged in a predictable and platform-independent manner. Because of its emphasis on comprehensibility and software independence, the data format defined by the schema may also serve an archival function.
This project is supported jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.