Professional Documents
Culture Documents
At the TEI and XML in Digital Libraries Workshop that was held at the Library of
Congress in July 1998, several working groups were formed to consider various
aspects of the Text Encoding Initiative. Group 1 was charged to recommend
some best practices for TEI header content and to review the relationship
between the Text Encoding Initiative header and MARC. To this end,
representatives of the University of Virginia Library and the University of
Michigan Library gathered in Ann Arbor in early October to develop a
recommended practice guide. Our work was assisted by similar efforts that had
taken place in the United Kingdom under the auspices of the Oxford Text Archive
the previous year. The following document represents a draft of those
recommended practices. It has been submitted to various constituencies for
comment
Definition:
SGML (ISO 8879) and ISO 646 (7-bit character set standard). Encodings for
different views of text; alternative encodings for the same text features;
mechanisms for user-defined extensions to the scheme. The Guidelines make it
possible to encode many different views of the text, simulataneously if necessary.
TEI Guidelines are not prescriptive: few features are mandatory, but the
Guidelines define a core set of tags. Extensible. The focus is on the capture of
text that already exists in another medium rather than text creation.
• encoding description (level of detail of the analysis-the aim or purpose for which
an electronic file was encoded; editorial principles and practices used during the
encoding of the text),
• text profile (classificatory and contextual information such as the text’s subject
matter; the languages and sublanguages used, the situation in which it was
produced, the participants and their setting),
http://libraries.mit.edu/guides/subjects/metadata/standards/tei.html
HISTORY
The TEI was established in 1987 to develop, maintain, and promulgate
hardware- and software-independent methods for encoding humanities data in
electronic form. Over nearly three decades the TEI has been extraordinarily
successful at achieving its objective and it is now widely used by scholarly
projects and libraries around the world.
Although a comprehensive history of the TEI has not yet been written, all known
documentary resources about the TEI are stored in the Archive. If you (or others
you know) have electronic copies of any original TEI documents not available
here, please get in touch.The archive of the TEI-L discussion list is a rich
resource for historical information, as is the archive of the now defunct TEI-TECH
mailing list, which can be downloaded in its entirety.
When the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was originally established, scholarly
projects and libraries attempting to take advantage of digital technology seemed
to be faced with an overwhelming obstacle to creating sustainable and shareable
archives and tools: the proliferating systems for representing textual material.
These systems seemed almost always to be incompatible, often poorly designed,
and multiplying at nearly the same rapid rate as the electronic text projects
themselves. This situation was inhibiting the development of the full potential of
computers to support humanistic inquiry by erecting barriers to access, creating
new problems for preservation, making the sharing of data (and theories) difficult,
and making the development of common tools impractical.
Part of the problem was simply a lack of opportunity for sustained communication
and coordination, but there were more systemic forces at work as well. Longevity
and re-usability were clearly not high on the priority lists of software vendors and
electronic publishers, and proprietary formats were often part of a business
strategy that might benefit a particular company, but at the expense of the
broader scholarly and cultural community. At the end of the eighties there was a
real concern that the entrepreneurial forces which (then as now) drive information
technology forward would impede such integration by the proliferation of mutually
incompatible technical standards.
The initial phase resulted in the release of the first draft (known as "P1") of the
Guidelines in June 1990. A second phase, involving an additional 15 working
groups making revisions and extensions, immediately began and released its
results throughout 1990–1993. Then, after another round of revisions,
extensions, and supplements, the first official version of the Guidelines (‘P3’) was
released in May 1994. Early on in this process a number of leading humanities
textbase projects adopted the Guidelines — while they were still very much a
moving target of rapidly changing drafts — as their encoding scheme, identifying
problems and needs and contributing proposed solutions.
In addition, workshops and seminars were conducted to introduce the wider
community to the Guidelines and ensure a steady source of experience to
support continuing development. As more scholars became acquainted with the
Guidelines, comments, corrections, and requests for extensions arrived from
around the world. In the end there were nearly 200 scholars from many
disciplines, professions, and countries in the core group that was developing the
TEI Guidelines.
The goal of establishing the TEI Consortium was to maintain a permanent home
for the TEI as a democratically constituted, academically and economically
independent, self-sustaining, non-profit organization. In addition, the TEI
Consortium was intended to foster a broad-based user community with sustained
involvement in the future development and widespread use of the TEI
Guidelines. In both of these goals the creation of the Consortium has proven a
positive step. Inasmuch as the original goal of the TEI was to promote
collaborative research on electronic texts, by making the encoding system no
longer an obstacle to such work, the Consortium's efforts are similarly directed
towards making the TEI encoding system as effective a tool for creating,
archiving, and sharing textual data as possible. For its members, the TEI
Consortium provides valuable services to assist them in the creation and use of
digital resources, and to help them stay abreast of rapidly changing technologies
and practices.
Following the establishment of the TEI Consortium, a critical priority was the
release of an XML version of the TEI Guidelines, updating P3 to enable users to
work with the emerging XML toolset. The P4 version of the Guidelines was
published in June 2002. It was essentially an XML version of P3, making no
substantive changes to the constraints expressed in the schemas apart from
those necessitated by the shift to XML, and changing only corrigible errors
identified in the prose of the P3 Guidelines. However, given that P3 had by this
time been in steady use since 1994, it was clear that a substantial revision of its
content was necessary, and work began immediately on the P5 version of the
Guidelines. This was planned as a thorough overhaul, involving a public call for
features and new development in a set of crucial areas including character
encoding, graphics, manuscript description, standoff markup, and the language
in which the TEI Guidelines themselves are written. The P5 version of the
Guidelines is scheduled to be released at the end of 2007.
OBJECTIVE
1) Review notes and documents prepared by Manuscript Description work
group concerning collation.
2) Review the needs and practices of those parts of the TEI community (and
relevant parts of the potential TEI community: i.e. those who would use
the TEI if it included provision for this kind of encoding) likely to use
facilities for encoding collation and physical document structure.
http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~jaheim/teiguide.html
BENEFITS
There are several tangible benefits of membership in the TEI Consortium, and
the TEI is in the process of developing additional benefits as well. One of the
most important benefits, which is difficult to quantify, is the fact that support for
the TEI helps ensure that this important community standard will continue to be
available and supported for the future, and that its development keeps pace with
the needs of the text encoding community. Other, more specific benefits, include
the following:
3) Discounts on software
The TEI works to negotiate discounts with vendors of software. Currently
TEI members and subscribers are entitled to a 20% discount on the
popular <oXygen/> XML editor, which comes bundled with TEI schemas
and stylesheets. Members and subscribers may obtain a discount code by
contacting the TEI at membership@tei-c.org.
http://www.tei-c.org/Membership/benefits.xml?style=printable
CONCLUSION
The above overview hopefully demonstrates the comprehensive nature of the
TEI Header as a mechanism for documenting electronic texts. The emergence of
the electronic text over the past decade has presented librarians and cataloguers
with many new challenges. Existing library cataloguing procedures, while
inadequate to document all the features of electronic texts properly, were used as
a secure foundation onto which additional features directly relevant to the
electronic text could be grafted. Chapter Nine of AACR2 (Anglo-American
Cataloguing Rules) requires substantial updating and revision, as it assumes that
all electronic texts are published through a publishing company and cannot
adequately catalogue texts which are only published on the Internet. The TEI
Header has proved to be an invaluable tool for those concerned with
documenting electronic resources; its supremacy in this field can be measured
by the increasing number of electronic text centres, libraries, and archives which
have adopted its framework. The Oxford Text Archive has found it indispensable
as a means of managing its large collection of disparate electronic texts, not only
as a mechanism for creating its searchable catalogue, but as a means of creating
other forms of metadata which can communicate with other information systems.
Ironically it is the same generality and flexibility offered by the TEI Guidelines
(P3) on creating a header which have hindered the progress of one of the main
goals of the TEI and the hopes of the electronic text community as a whole,
namely the interoperability and interchangeability of metadata. Unlike the Dublin
Core element set, which has a defined set of rules governing its content, the TEI
Header has a set of guidelines, which allow for widely divergent approaches to
header creation. While this is not a major problem for individual texts, or texts
within a single collection, the variant way in which the guidelines are interpreted
and put into practice make easy interoperability with other systems using TEI
Headers more difficult than first imagined. As with the Dublin Core element set,
what is required is the wholescale adoption of a mutually acceptable code of
practice which header creators could implement. One final aspect of the TEI
Header which is a cause of irritation to those creating and managing TEI
Headers and texts; the apparent dearth of affordable and user-friendly software
aimed specifically at header production. While this has long been a general
criticism of SGML applications as a whole, the TEI can in no way be held to
blame for this absence, as it was not part of the TEI remit to create software.
However it has contributed to the relatively slow uptake and implementation of
the TEI Header as the predominant method of providing well structured metadata
to the electronic text community as a whole. Until this situation is adequately
resolved the tools on offer tend to be freeware products designed by people
within the SGML community itself, or large and very expensive purpose-built
SGML aware products aimed at the commercial market.
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr500/2000-2001-wt1/www/L_Little-Wolfe/tei.htm