Minutes from 14 November 2009

Attendees: Kenneth Reed, Laurent Romary, Arianna Ciula, John Grucelski, Bill Kasdorf, David Sewell, Emily Arkin, Bill Kasdorf, Kathryn Tomasek, Laura C Mandell, James Lee (very briefly Susan Schreibman and Lou Burnard)

This was the first business/working meeting of the new Scholarly Publishing SIG. The agenda was very open, focusing on some of the primary goals of the SIG:


 * TEI Customization
 * XML workflows
 * Deriving other formats (.epub/HTML)
 * QA/Schematron

Introductions were made around the table, and some specific projects using TEI in publishing were discussed.

Kenneth Reed detailed the motivation for creating the SIG, with the need for XML workflows existing primarily in the university press community, though certainly not limited to it. Reed discussed the collaborative, Mellon-funded project he is working on, with partners at UNC Press, UNC libraries, the Center for Civil Rights at the UNC law school, and the Southern Oral History Program.

Laurent Romary discussed working on a journal project in Europe, channeling journal articles into a repository. Twelve publishers are involved, including Elsevier and OUP. The strategy is to align with NLM and normalize content in TEI. The published paper is here: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00390966/fr/.

Arianna Ciula from the European Science Foundation discussed XML workflows for both online and print production.

John Grucelski discussed MPublishing, the new merger of University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan. The press is moving towards an XML workflow, and are facing the same issues as many other presses.

James Lee from Wayne State University Press also mentioned the need for an XML workflow.

Emily Arkin from Harvard University Press discussed encoding backlist and frontlist titles for future projects.

David Sewell discussed Rotunda and the digital scholarship coming out of University of Virginia Press.

Bill Kasdorf from Apex CoVantage talked about working as a consultant for various university presses, and with IDPF on the epub maintenance-working group.

Kathryn Tomasek is a historian from Wheaton College and aspires to deliver XML content to publishers.

The primary discussion dealt with TEI customization. David Sewell pointed out two constituencies: Europe and North America. He noted a primary reason for this sort of discussion is in following standards and allowing for interchange of data. Romary discussed the NLM model and how it has varying schemas for authoring, for journal articles, for interchange, for books. The TEI model has a larger “bandwidth of convertability.” Romary also goes on to stress the urgency in get this SIG working on a customization.

Romary suggested as a starting point the creation of recommended practices for the SIG wiki. We should begin to identify a few specific features of scholarly published objects, and put up examples on the wiki with recommendations, and see if a consensus will build. In a relatively short time, we could put out a white paper on our recommendations.

In addition to these recommended features, Romary suggested putting up accepted standards on the wiki.

David Sewell mentioned the libraries SIG, and the work they are doing there as something to emulate. He also mentioned creating recommendations for authors.

Romary demonstrated an online service that is not yet live that would allow for the upload of articles in PDF form and would convert them to TEI. The references in the articles would be cross-checked in a database for authoritative forms and TEI encoded bibliographies would be produced.

Susan Schreibman mentioned that she met one of the heads of research at Microsoft and they discussed possible collaborations, including the possibility of making TEI an output for Word. She will follow up on this to see how feasible it is. She also suggested working groups as a way other SIGs have been productive.

Lou Burnard mentioned ACLS; we should be taking a look at their schema (which was based on TEI) to see if it could fit the role for the SIG.