Documentation for the Selective Encoding of Music Documents

This document presents a pair of formalized schemes for including information about the completeness of a Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) encoding with respect to the extent of the source data represented by the file. We refer to such an encoding as a "Selective Encoding." Our more structured method takes advantage of MEI's capacity to create customized schemas. It features both new and repurposed elements and attributes to model a music encoding as the complete collection of a source's encoded and unencoded sections. Each section is provided with a unique ID and a set of parameter values that allow for easy-to-find and easy-to-read metadata regarding the extent of the score's digital representation. Our simpler method works within already existing MEI structures and is essentially a clarification of existing usage, taking advantage of element entailments along with text descriptions to identify and retrieve encoding information from an MEI file.