The documentation plan they have put forth, briefly explained, calls for the tagging of information in exhibition catalogs and wall labels according to what values each piece of information holds. Dates, place names, people's names, material names, subject-access points, and other designations are all tagged. All of the elements within these tags will correspond to their appropriate authority files. Their intention is that a controlled vocabulary search will facilitate retrieval of information relevant to the informational values deemed necessary for the search. The most obvious answer is that it points to a need for online resource centers to invest time in detailed description of the materials they are presenting.
Descriptive practices are essential to having any large body of materials available and accessible.
Using SGML as a descriptive tool not only encourages adherence to descriptive standards, it allows for information found in records to be identified more accurately and precisely and related to each other in more dynamic ways. As the question implies, the models put forth in the archival and museum communities do not completely relate to the needs of a multimedia digital resource network, in the fact that these models are designed to disseminate document surrogates rather than actual documents. Document surrogates will be created, but they will be attached to each digital artifact, enabling search results that will retrieve a long or brief description of the artifact values as well as the actual artifact. Considering the variety of media formats and data values that will comprise a collection of ethnomusicological materials, a new DTD is being written to reflect the ways in which this information will be useful for research and education. This DTD will not be entirely original.