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.

Suggestion: You may want to also include argument some library administrators make that TEI work is best left to digital humanities departments, not libraries. We hired a new library director two years ago, who has made this argument. Our TEI work and instruction in the library has since been suspended (R. Wisneski, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH)