Subject: [CODE4LIB] Join Us to Plan a Service for Publishing TEI Documents

From: Rosalyn Metz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 17:48:37 -0500

*Join Us to Plan a Service for Publishing TEI Documents*

Wheaton, Mount Holyoke, and Dickinson Colleges seek scholars, librarians,
and technologists, particularly those from small liberal arts colleges, to
join us over the next year in a series meetings sponsored by a collaborative
planning grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to
plan a TEI publishing service.

Many scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and students working
with TEI at smaller institutions often do so without peer or technical
support. Having completed the considerable task of encoding their text, they
ask themselves: now that I have my document encoded in TEI, what do I do
with it?

As an XML application, TEI has huge potential for multimedia presentation,
data mashups, visualizations, or sophisticated print layout. However,
without knowledge of XSLT and other XML technologies, the options are either
inaccessible or difficult to learn and to use. In its native form as XML,
TEI is of limited practical use: publishers generally don't accept it,
non-technical colleagues often don't understand it, and XML alone is of
little use when presenting at disciplinary conferences.

We propose a service that would serve two broad functions:

   1. Easy-to-use document conversion from valid TEI into forms that can be
appreciated by those not familiar with TEI or XML encoding. Obvious
possibilities include conversion to a printable PDF or browseable webpage,
but could also include conversion to a variety of formats suitable for
consumption by other tools and services for text analysis, visualization,
and data mashups, etc.

   2. Long-term TEI hosting, offering open or controlled web access, search,
metadata control, etc. With a central hosting service, scholars, librarians,
and technologists would be able to share their work with colleagues,
scholarly communities, or the public by uploading their document and
receiving a URL. The service will optionally also register the content with
popular search engines and resource collections to make the TEI document
findable as well as accessible.

With this service, our intention is to support scholars, librarians, and
technologists who currently have TEI files, as well as to attract new users
interested in TEI but unsure of what can be done with it. Our hope is that a
hosting and conversion service will serve to distribute the scholarly work
in an attractive, readable form, thereby promoting both their work and the
TEI as a scholarly standard. We intend this to be an ongoing service, and
are developing it with long-term sustainability as a key priority.

Participation in the initiative involves a commitment to:

    * attend three meetings to be held in March, June, and September 2010 at
the three colleges.

    * bring your institution's perspective and expertise to the planning and
design of the service.

We are very excited by the potential contribution of this project to the TEI
and scholarly community.  Please contact [email-masked] by January
23 if you are interested in participating.  We are looking for people who
have experience with TEI to participate in the meetings and the planning,
but everyone else is welcome to contact us.  The first meeting will be in
March at Mount Holyoke College in Western Massachusetts (
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/).

This project is a collaborative effort of Wheaton, Mount Holyoke, and
Dickinson Colleges and is sponsored by the collaborative planning grant from
the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  Expenses for participants,
such as travel, lodging, and meals are covered by the IMLS grant.

-----
Rosalyn Metz
Systems Administrator for Curricular Support
Library Information Services
Wheaton College
phone: 508-286-3733