mei-friend is an editor for MEI that aims to support and facilitate the 'last mile' of the music encoding process. This currently includes correcting encodings generated through conversion from other formats or using optical music recognition. The tool is a cross-browser web application, thus requiring no additional software installation. It integrates the web-based code editor CodeMirror and the music engraving tool Verovio into a user-friendly graphical interface that enables interconnected navigation and editing of the MEI encoding, both as XML and through the graphical notation rendered by Verovio. Above all, mei-friend offers a wealth of additional features to streamline workflows related to MEI, including schema-based code completion, GitHub integration, keyboard shortcuts, an easy-to-use interface to the MEI guidelines, and a directory of publicly licensed MEI encodings.

However, the 'last mile' in dealing with scores encompasses much more in musicological workflows: In addition to generating and preparing music encodings, their enrichment is equally important, which is why the MEI format plays a crucial role in the (music) scholarly context. As the only music encoding format, it natively supports not only various types of notation (in addition to modern Western notation, also neumes, tablatures, and mensural notation) but also fine-grained cross-references—both within a document and to other digital objects—as well as complex transcription-related and editorial markup. Currently, this potential is unfortunately limited to a relatively small circle of experts, as there is a lack of graphical tools and user interfaces that could assist in the generation and visual verification. To address this gap, the user interface of mei-friend is planned to be expanded to enable creating graphical selections with a simple mouse click and, based on this, interact with both editorial markup and annotations.

In this regard, mei-friend is intended to enable the creation of variants with additional readings through the cloning and simplified modification of selected passages and the user-friendly capture of sources. Additionally, the finding and management of markup should be made easier.

Furthermore, we aim for the simplified enrichment of MEI documents with score-related annotations, both through document-internal (inline) annotations using <annot> elements and in the form of standoff annotations following the Web Annotation Data Model recommended by the W3C. These standoff annotations are particularly suitable for scenarios where comments on a jointly used and published MEI resource are created by multiple users in different usage contexts. These standoff annotations can be stored online in a Personal Online Datastore (POD) of a Solid server to facilitate flexible and user-controlled annotation management in a low-threshold manner (cf. Weigl et al., "Read/Write Digital Libraries for Musicology," DLfM 2020, https://doi.org/10.1145/3424911.3425519).

This project is funded within the 2nd Forum „(Further) development of Research Tools & Data Services in NFDI4Culture“ by NFDI4Culture (DFG project number 441958017).