Envisioning Dante

a metadata journey from Inferno to Paradiso. Case study: Le terze rime di Dante: from Alma MARC (18873) to MDC TEI (PR-ALDI-18873)

Abstract

Through the case study of Le terze rime di Dante (PR‑ALDI‑18873), this article charts the progression from a MARC bibliographic record in Ex Libris Alma | Primo to an enriched TEI‑XML file that forms a meaningful digital object in Manchester Digital Collections (MDC). The case study outlines the automated and editorial stages of the workflow, highlights key modelling decisions and challenges, and reflects on TEI’s value as a flexible, expressive framework for describing digitised early printed books whose complexity exceeds the limits of standard bibliographic control. It demonstrates that while automation enables efficiency, human‑led editorial intervention remains essential to produce accurate, semantically rich, and reusable metadata for sustainable digital collections.