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, 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.