Consortium for Digital Documents
Document TEI ED A88
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Lou Burnard
This document is a draft and is subject to change
without notice. It represents one possible description of
the work to be undertaken by the consortium, and should not be
taken as a rejection of other possible descriptions.
Table of Contents
The explosive rise in the use of digital documents and wide-area
networks in research and teaching poses enormous challenges to users of
electronic documents. This document describes a proposal for a
consortium of academic and other institutions to enable us to address
some of these challenges cooperatively.
The purpose of the consortium is to cooperate in solving
fundamental practical problems which arise in using digital documents in
teaching and research.
The consortium will initially have three main areas of work:
- cooperation in software system assembly and integration
- training, workshops, and maintenance of information resources
- technical cooperation in the development and maintenance of
relevant standards and infrastructure (TEI, EAD, XML, etc.)
Library electronic text centers and other bodies responsible for
providing access to some large collection of digital documents cannot
rely on turnkey solutions to their problems. The requirements of
teaching and research are too various, and too remote from typical
commercial and industrial practice. Software powerful enough to serve
the needs of research and teaching not only allows, but almost
invariably requires, substantial customization to make it match the
needs of the individual center.
The customization and adaptation of complex software products is
not intrinsically beyond the capability of libraries or other
organizations but does require substantial staff time and technical
expertise. The software support provided by vendors seldom suffices to
make the customization process simple; as a result, academic users of
complex software can often learn more from each other than from the
vendor. The experiences of schools like the Universities of Michigan,
Virginia, and Chicago show that cooperation on problems of system
integration can bear significant benefits.
The consortium will provide a framework for cooperation on
problems of system integration and adaptation, including:
- regular meetings of technical staff involved in system
integration and support, for exchange of experience
- development, both by member institutions and centrally by
consortium staff, of small-scale tools usable by individual researchers
encoding digital documents or using them in research or teaching
- negotiation of group purchase and support agreements with
relevant vendors
- negotiation with vendors to offer customized training for
consortium members and other academic institutions
- (when feasible) provision of centralized services such as
mounting resources on consortium servers, for institutions which choose
not to mount them locally; the consortium will charge fees for such
services, sufficient to recover its costs
The consortium will offer a full range of training courses,
workshops, and information resources relevant to its areas of interest.
For example:
- general introductions to SGML and XML markup with focus on
the markup schemes of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Encoded Archival
Description (EAD), or other relevant DTDs
- specialized training in the use of TEI for historical and
literary editions
- specialized training in the use of EAD for archival finding aids
- technical training for staff responsible for markup projects, for
developing and maintaining full-text retrieval systems, etc.
Web resources will also be maintained, to ensure the availability
of non-proprietary information on issues of interest to consortium
members.
As far as possible, training courses and workshops should be
self-supporting; participants from member institutions will pay lower
fees than participants from non-member institutions. (Special
arrangements may be made for independent scholars.)
Consortium funds may be used to provide scholarships for promising
students.
The consortium will contribute directly to the maintenance of
standards relevant for the use of digital documents in research and
teaching. In particular, it will
- support technical and editorial work on the TEI Guidelines (work
group and other committee meetings, staff time for central secretariat,
staff time for editorial work, etc.); the consortium will (provided that
agreement can be reached with the original sponsors) serve as the
maintenance agency for the TEI Guidelines
- support technical work on the Encoded Archival Description (EAD)
and other relevant DTDs; the consortium will cooperate with the Society
of American Archivists as the responsible organization and with the
Library of Congress as the responsible maintenance agency for the EAD
- collaborate with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the
National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO), and other relevant bodies in the
development of relevant standards and specifications (such as SGML, XML,
and related standards); the consortium may join these other bodies as a
member, or serve as an accredited observer, or collaborate with them in
other ways; consortium staff may devote significant time to standards
development projects
The consortium will be governed by its members (details to be
arranged).
The central consortium offices will be located at one of its
member institutions (the host institution). The host institution will
- agree to house the consortium offices and staff
- provide basic infrastructure including network access and
computing facilities
- act as employer of record for consortium staff
The payment of indirect costs from the consortium to the host
institution is a matter for separate negotiation.
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