proposed letter to Faulhaber, Chesnutt

[John Unsworth]

Folks,

Here's what I propose sending to Charles and David, in re: the TEI 
Consortium's "adoption" of documentation, DTDs, etc. for TEI-related 
projects.  If you approve, I'll send it along--but comments, suggestions, 
objections, etc. are also welcome.

J.

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Dear David/Charles,

The TEI Council recently met, by conference call, and took up the question 
that each of you, separately, had put forward, concerning the Consortium's 
willingness to "adopt" materials (DTDs, documentation, stylesheets, etc.) 
from TEI-based projects (in David's case, MEP, and in Charles' case, MS 
transcription materials from the Digital Scriptorium project).  The 
consensus of the Council was this:

1.  The TEI Consortium would be happy to store and serve up to the web 
copies of these materials, on the Consortium web site.  This is not a 
long-term archival solution, but the Consortium will be investigating 
long-term archival arrangements for all of the material is houses and 
produces, and these materials would be included in whatever arrangement is 
developed.  Meanwhile, we would be a reference site for these materials.

2.  The TEI Consortium would not, by housing the materials, commit to 
further developing them, migrating them, etc.: we would simply keep and 
deliver them in the form in which you deposit them with us.

3.  By agreeing to serve as a reference site for these materials, the TEI 
Consortium doesn't mean to imply that these materials will be integrated 
into future releases of the TEI Guidelines.  Of course, they might, but the 
mechanism by which that would be accomplished, in these cases as in any 
other, would be a Council-commissioned TEI workgroup.

4.  The TEI Consortium would like to use these two cases as examples for 
the consideration and development of internal methods and standards for 
"certification" of TEI-related standards and practices.  We're frankly not 
sure what certification would mean, and we would like to work with you to 
answer that question, if it interests you--but we think there could be some 
value to your projects, and to the TEI, in establishing a mechanism by 
means of which the TEI Consortium could recommend re-usable TEI-related 
tools and methods.

If you accept items 1-3, you can simply send your materials to Lou Burnard, 
and we'll create a space for them on the TEI site.  If you agree to item 4, 
we can begin to talk with you about what kind of certification would be 
meaningful and useful, from your point of view, and how to go about 
benchmarking, etc..

Thanks very much,

John Unsworth