Unique ID

From Whitman Archive

"Unique ID" stands for "unique identifier."

According to the encoding guidelines of the Whitman Archive, unique identifiers are one-of-a-kind names assigned to each electronic text we create. That is, every poem, collection of poems and work (for an explanation of "work" vs. "document" click here) must have a unique ID.

For manuscripts, IDs are made up of a 3-character repository code plus a 5-digit number (assigned in ascending order), with the two fields separated by a dot.

Examples:

   * loc.00158 (a manuscript at the Library of Congress)
   * uva.00001 (a manuscript at University of Virginia) 

Printed texts are all assigned the 3-letter prefix "ppp."

ID Databases on the Web:

We use a database to track the unique identifiers and our workflow as we transcribe, encode, and upload manuscripts. This database can be accessed here.

Placement of ID's

The unique identifier appears in two places in the TEI header:

  • As an attribute value in the TEI.2 root element (the very first tag):

<TEI.2 id="uva.00001">

  • As content in the <publicationStmt>:

<publicationStmt> <idno>uva.00001</idno>