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So, in 1987, an international group of researchers seeking to remedy these problems created the foundations of the Text Encoding Initiative. Also, this proliferation of standards aggravated the problem of preservation: what would happen when a standard became obsolete? Who would ensure the long-term preservation of these new documents in the years, decades, and even centuries to come? These important questions were not being answered. In other words, under such circumstances, computers could not increase access in the way that people had hoped.
#Text encoding initiative guidelines full
In the 1980s, incompatible systems for encoding and representing texts were multiplying, a situation which “was inhibiting the development of the full potential of computers to support humanistic inquiry” (TEI “ Origins”). Confused? Put another way, the TEI is both the name of an organization and the name of an encoding language produced by that organization. As such, it holds an annual meeting, maintains discussions and working groups, and, most importantly, publishes and maintains guidelines for the encoding of text, also called TEI. What is TEI? The TEI is an institution: a consortium of universities, libraries, archives, and others dedicated to the development of an encoding standard for the preservation, description, and publication of digital editions. So the Bancroft Library works with the Advanced Papyrological Information System ( APIS) project to make their papyri available the Folger Library makes its collections available and offers virtual tours through its website and the Fihrist Islamic Manuscripts Catalogue Online offers access to materials (minus, perhaps, a few pages) from the British Library, the Bodleian, and several other UK institutions. After all, one of the goals of the American Library Association is “to ensure access to information by all” (ALA “ Mission and History”).ĭigital technology promises to relieve this tension by granting access to a very wide audience with only minimal risk to the materials. But even in the face of these dangers, preservation must not occlude access. doesn’t want kids on field trips handling a 1604 edition of Hamlet. And no adolescent could match the perniciousness of well-informed thieves such as Farhad Hakimzadeh, the businessman and antiquarian who from 2003 to 2009 used a scalpel to extract pages from some 150 rare books at the British Library and Oxford's Bodleian Library (see this BBC article for more). What’s more, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Each time a researcher visits the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, to view the Tebtunis Papyri collection, for example, the millenniums-old papyrus pith is susceptible to damage. But there is a tension between the two, because institutions often must limit the access to their special collections in order to preserve them. Viewed from this author’s lay-person’s perspective, libraries, museums, archives, and other custodians of the world’s textual heritage exist to serve at least two crucial functions when it comes to their rare collections: access and preservation. Townsend Fellowships for Library and Museum Professionalsīy developing and maintaining an encoding standard for the digitization of text, the Text Encoding Initiative ( TEI) is helping to deliver on the the internet's promise to democratize access to the world’s cultural-in this case, textual-heritage.