Panel: TEI in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Practices

TEI in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Practices

David
Seaman
Electronic Text Center University of
Virginia
dms8f@virginia.edu

LeeEllen
Friedland
Preservation Directorate Library of
Congress
lfri@loc.gov

Chris
Powell
Humanities Text Initiative University of
Michigan
sooty@umich.edu

Chris
Ruotolo
Electronic Text Center University of
Virginia
cjr2q@virginia.edu

Jackie
Shieh
Alderman Library University of Virginia
ejs7y@virginia.edu

Natalia
Smith
Wilson Library University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill
nsmith@email.unc.edu

Perry
Willett
Main Library Indiana University
pwillett@indiana.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

David Seaman, Chair
On June 30-July 1 1998 the Digital Library Federation organized a meeting at the
Library of Congress in Washington D.C. on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and
Extensible Markup Language (XML). Representatives attended from libraries all
over North America and Europe. For more information, see:

The practical result of this conference is rapid and ongoing work by that part of
the library community most involved with TEI; the aim is in short order to
provide firm, "library-centric" guidelines in the following areas:
1. encoded full-texts
2. metadata (especially MARC/TEI/Dublin Core interchange)
3. the use of TEI to manage page-image projects like JSTOR

Each working group spawned a smaller taskforce to continue the work started in
this 2-day meeting.
The taskforces for two of the three groups - encoded texts and metadata - have
already had follow-up meetings and are issuing draft reports; they met again at
ALA, in late January 1999, to incorporate comments and finalize the draft Guide
to Recommended Practices. The metadata group were able to draw gratefully on the
findings that came out of last year's "Putting our Headers Together" TEI meeting
at Oxford University (immediately prior to DRH97). The format of this was a
useful model for the text encoding group too, who started with a similar meeting
to discuss what we already do ("Putting our Bodies Together", we called it).
The ACH/ALLC conference in June 1999 is the ideal first venue to publicly unveil
and discuss these recommendations. It will give our users a chance to comment,
it will allow librarians in attendance to challenge, augment, and adopt our
findings, and (as important as any of the above) it will allow us to start a
dialogue with major etext publishers to see if they can begin to deliver texts
in forms that integrate closely with the data -- and crucially the metadata --
that we create in-house.
The level of commitment to this endeavor has been high, and the ability to
present the first version of the Guidelines at the 1999 ACH/ALLC conference
(which many of us are attending) provides us with the best, quickest feedback
and the opportunity to discuss how we will continue on to a second year of
meetings. It is my hope that we can sustain the momentum we currently enjoy to
hone the Guidelines and to provide further guidance and tools -- such as the
TEI/MARC webform program that is underway at Virginia and the collective guide
to TEI tag usage, also in process, that draws on examples of use from a variety
of holdings. We believe that our presentation at the ACH/ALLC will be mutually
beneficial for us and for the general TEI community, since libraries are a major
but often under-represented component in the larger TEI universe.
The panel will begin with a brief background summary by the Chair, and move
swiftly to reports from each of the three Taskforce areas. Of particular
importance to elucidate is not only our findings and recommendations, but the
lively process we have gone through - are going through - to reach this
consensus, and our reasons for rejecting certain alternatives. Given the nature
of this set of Guidelines, and our desire for feedback and modification, we
expect to allow plentiful time for discussion.
The Taskforce members are all TEI and metadata practitioners - librarians from
institutions with a long investment in online delivery of encoded data and a
firm sense of mission about what they do and why.
This attempt by a major TEI user-community to define for itself common practices
in data and metadata creation should hold some useful lessons for other clearly
defined TEI communities (textual editors, non-Library university producers,
publishers, journal producers) who so far have not articulated a core set of
Best Practices, or undergone a critical self-examination of current practices as
a way to define recommendations for the future.