Transmission Metadata

An item’s transmission journey will typically begin with a sender: correspAction type="sent". This element should at least enclose a persName element with the sender’s ID, and may be elaborated with elements specifying a date on which and place from which an item was sent. For example, a letter sent by Forbes from Leith on July 29, 1750 would look like:

If an item is subsequently sent to another recipient, correspAction type="forwarded" is used, and may be elaborated with the same enclosed elements as

type="sent"

.

Between a sender and recipient, we aim to illustrate the means by which items moved from place to place. Items are either sent by post or by another bearer–i.e. someone in whom the writer places more trust than in than the postal system, and who carries the item to the recipient. For either of these scenarios, use correspAction type="carried". For a bearer, add a ref attribute with the bearer’s ID. If the sender or recipient states that the item was sent by post, add a subtype attribute.

So, for bearer Flora MacDonald: correspAction type="carried" ref="prs:MDONF1"/

And for post: correspAction type="carried" subtype="byPost"/

Typically at the end of an item’s transmission, but sometimes before an item is forwarded or otherwise shared, the item will have a recipient. This is encoded as correspAction type="received", within which is nested the persName of the recipient, the date on which they received the item, and the placeName in which they received it. If there is no response to an item to confirm its receipt, we take this information from the letter as addressed; a date can only be added when specified in a response or one of Forbes’s headings.

Senders and recipients of items sometimes use aliases for reasons of political safety, and might also use pseudonyms for places. These are treated in metadata similarly to how they would be in-text. In v06.1280.01, for example, Forbes signs a letter with the name "Thomas Smith." Nested within the correspAction type="sent" attribute, the name Thomas Smith should be enclosed with the persName element pointing to Forbes’s ID: persName ref="prs:FORBR1">Thomas Smith</persName. Likewise for placeNames: the ref points to an actual ID, with the pseudonym as text enclosed within the placeName element.

Any of this data may be found not within the item itself, but scattered throughout LiM. Where data (most often the names of senders and recipients, the dates of letters, and the places from which letters were sent or to which they were directed) is found in the text of the item or in Forbes’s heading for the item, that data may be entered without the evidence attribute. An exception is if the entered data isn’t stated clearly in the item, so some amount of conjecture is involved. For example, on p. 1228, Ralph Bigland states that he is in a rush to finish his letter to "save the opportunity of Capt Dick," who is "just a going," implying that Captain Dick is to bear the letter. This would be encoded as:

If the data is found in another item or even outside of LiM, the evidence and source attributes should be used. A common example of this is where the recipient of a letter will state the date on which that letter arrived ("I received your last on June 10"). In which case, evidence attribute would be "internal" to LiM, and a source attribute would point to the latter of the letters. For instance, in v06.1280.01, Forbes tells George Innes that Innes’s letter of March 15 (v06.1254.01) was delivered to Forbes "only today" (in a letter dated April 29, 1749). This would be encoded in the metadata for v06.1254.01 as:

Where we have a chain of correspondence, a letter sent in acknowledgment of the sending of some other genre of item, or an item sent in response to an earlier request, we connect those items through the correspContext element as a direct child of correspDesc. If the item is responding to an earlier item, we encode that earlier item by nesting ref type="prev"/ with an @target attribute. If we know the item was followed up with a response, we use ref type="next"/. For example, v06.1214.02 is Forbes’s "return" to a letter from Anne Leith (v06.1214.01), to which Anne Leith later responded (v06.1284.01). Encoded, the correspContext for v06.1214.02 would look like:

If the item referred to is in LiM, no further information is necessary, as that item will have its own elaborated metadata. If the item is not in LiM, we should add as much information as we are given, or any that is perhaps to be found externally. This entails nesting persName, date, and placeName elements within the ref element, just as a correspAction is elaborated–with the exception that instead of just one persName for a correspAction the ref for correspContext should include a sender as well as a recipient: persName to persName.