TEI Libraries SIG Manifesto

Here is our initial outline of a manifesto that states rationales that library administration leaders should consider for supporting TEI. We welcome all comments, edits, and suggested changes!

Outline

• Preamble
• Rationale for digitizing (in one sentence): why we make things digital … first principles. Reference CLIR docs.
• For different intended uses of content, different types of access mechanisms are needed.
• While mass digitization meets many common needs, it’s insufficient for certain purposes, such as:
  • Things that don’t OCR (especially manuscripts and early printed works) and/or are illegible or hard to read in the page image
  • Source documents that can’t be scanned because they’re too fragile
  • Reference works where you want to be able to search on a headword
  •  ????

• For such things, we still need a non-proprietary format for representing a digital surrogate of the item that is designed for:
  • long-term preservation
  • data curation
  • interchange

• And which will enable:
  • visualization
  • analysis

• For textual content (but not data sets or purely tabular data published in print), the obvious choice is TEI.
• TEI encoding can be scoped: you don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) use all of its features.
• Encoding is often outsourced, including through AccessTEI. If your project calls for richer encoding, can enrich the outsourced data by doing the higher-level encoding in house.