Incorporating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Projects in Technical Services: an Examination of Possibilities and Potential Pitfalls

Abstract

This presentation will showcase work being done at an academic library to encode a collection of manuscripts on Cleveland and the Western Reserve in XML format following TEI guidelines, and address the objectives of and rationale for this endeavor. "The Manuscripts Relating to the Early History of the Western Reserve, 1795-1869" collection consists of over 200 manuscripts, and includes correspondences, journals, business records, government documents, and land surveys. This collection, housed at the Western Reserve Historical Society, is being transcribed and encoded by technical services staff. Such work is sometimes labor-intensive and timeconsuming. The project also raises a number of issues, including: Why perform text encoding at all? Should such work be left to scholars in the Digital Humanities instead? How can librarians and digital humanists collaborate? And how practical is it for technical services units to undertake such work? We will address these issues.