  We study the unoccupied electronic structure of the spin-1/2 quantum magnet
TiOCl by x-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES) at the Ti L and O K
edges. Data is acquired both in total electron and fluorescence yield mode (TEY
and FY, respectively). While only the latter allows to access the
unconventional low-temperature spin-Peierls (SP) phase of TiOCl the signal is
found to suffer from significant self-absorption in this case. Nevertheless, we
conclude from FY data that effects of the SP distortion on the electronic
structure are absent within experimental accuracy. The similarity of
room-temperature FY and TEY data, the latter not being obscured by
self-absorption, allows us to use TEY spectra for comparison with simulations.
These are performed by cluster calculations in D$_{4h}$ and D$_{2h}$ symmetries
using two different codes. We extract values of the crystal-field splitting
(CFS) and parametrize our results in often found notations by Slater, Racah and
Butler. In all cases, good agreement with published values from other studies
is found.
