[tei-council] [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Questions regarding RFI NNH09CA002L]]
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
daniel.odonnell at gmail.com
Fri Aug 7 16:08:44 EDT 2009
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Questions regarding RFI NNH09CA002L]
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 13:02:40 -0500
From: Keaton, Jacob (HQ-CJ000) <jacob.keaton at nasa.gov>
To: daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca <daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca>, Crusan, Jason
(HQ-CI000) <jason.crusan at nasa.gov>
CC: Laurent Romary <laurent.romary at loria.fr>, James Cummings
<James.Cummings at oucs.ox.ac.uk>
Mr. O’Donnell,
Thank you for your thoughts. To answer a few of your questions (1, 2,
and 3), please see the updated RFI, available at:
http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/home/von_Braun_RFI.html .
For question 4, we’d like as much detail as we can. Capturing the
handwritten detail on the typewritten pages is key, since this is how
Dr. von Braun made most of his notes. Capturing both original and
corrected versions would probably have to be accomplished on a
case-by-case basis- I can’t say universally how we’d want to handle
situations like that.
Question 5- there may be multiple copies of documents in the collection-
we won’t know until we have someone actually go through them. We would
like to be able to follow the development of a document over time, as
this will show how the thought processes progressed until they found a
working solution. How this would best be done is, of course, the subject
of this RFI.
Question 6- we don’t have a model yet for how we’re going to complete
this project. Part of our question in the RFI is what would be the best
way to accomplish it- there may be NASA funds available, or a funded
university or non-profit may be able to take the project on at no cost
to NASA. If NASA decides to hire a contractor to accomplish this task,
we will issue an Request for Proposals at a later date.
Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Regards,
Jacob Keaton
--
Jacob L. Keaton
International Space Station
Space Operations Mission Directorate
NASA Headquarters, Washington D.C.
202-358-1507
On 7/9/09 2:20 PM, "Daniel Paul O'Donnell" <daniel.odonnell at gmail.com>
wrote:
Dear Mr. Keaton and Crusan,
I'm following up on my email from last Thursday regarding the recent RFI
concerning the von Braun archive. We are quite interested in submitting
something for this call, as providing an infrastructure for the
digitization and dissemination of archival matter such as this is our
primary raison d'etre. We think that our membership and organisation
have experience uniquely suited to advising you in this area.
Of the questions below, the most important in terms of providing advice
about specific workflows, encoding options, and publication methods,
involve the size and composition of the archive. While it is possible to
produce generic advice on how to handle archival material, the size and
composition of the material greatly influences best practice and
generally strongly affects the granularity of the information it is
possible to capture in the digitization process.
Please let me know if it would be more convenient for me to call
regarding this information.
Thanks very much, and good luck in what looks like a very interesting
project!
-Dan O'Donnell
--------------
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of
America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société
pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project
(http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)
Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/
<http://people.uleth.ca/%7Edaniel.odonnell/>
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Questions regarding RFI NNH09CA002L
Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:02:49 -0600
From: Daniel Paul O'Donnell <daniel.odonnell at gmail.com>
Reply-To: daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca
Organization: University of Lethbridge
To: jacob.keaton at nasa.gov, jason.crusan at nasa.gov
CC: Laurent Romary <laurent.romary at loria.fr>
Dear Mr. Crusan and Mr. Keaton,
I am writing on behalf of the Text Encoding Initiative
(http://www.tei-c.org/) with some follow-up questions regarding the
recent RFI (NNH09CA002L) for the weekly notes of Dr. Wernher Von Braun.
I've written our questions out below, but would also be happy to discuss
them with you if you feel that that might be a more efficient use of
your time. I can call you at the numbers in the RFI or receive calls any
time on my cell: +1 403 393-2539.
The TEI is an international consortium of libraries, academic projects,
and scholarly societies dedicated to the development of robust standards
for the digitization of intellectual content. Now in its 22nd year, the
TEI is responsible for developing and maintaining highly influential XML
Guidelines for the encoding of high-value texts for use in situations
similar to that envisioned in your RFI. Our guidelines are used in a
wide variety of contexts, from academic libraries and archives,
scholarly publishers, and other institutions in the public and private
sector. We are also becoming increasingly active in supporting member
organisations in projects such as yours: indeed we are currently in the
final stages of an Andrew W. Mellon funded project investigating
work-flows for the mass digitisation of members' archives and have
recently helped the ISO develop an standard and workflow for the
conversion of in-house documentation to XML.
We are in the process of putting together a team from our technical
council and member organisations to respond to your RFI. In order to do
the most complete job we would like some additional information
regarding the collection and your plans for it. We realise that while
you will know about the size of the collection and the nature of the
material it contains, you may not yet have answers to questions
pertaining to your intentions for the data and the type and level of
detail you wish to capture in cataloguing and digitising it. Indeed in
these cases, the RFI is presumably designed to a certain extent
precisely to help you develop answers to such questions. However, it is
our experience that projects often do have a rough idea of how they
would like the user to interact with their material--and that this idea
can have a very significant effect on proposed work-flows. Even knowing
examples of other projects that you admire can be helpful in defining
the parameters of this one.
1. How large (i.e. number of pages) is the collection?
2. What formats are the original documents? The Appendix contains
examples of hand-annotated typescript; in media reports we have
also seen images that appear to be completely handwritten. Are
there also photographs and/or (hand or print) drawings that need
to be incorporated? Are there other formats? Any of particularly
poor quality (e.g. mimeographs or carbons?)
3. Have the documents already been scanned and/or transcribed? If so
in what format are the digital images and/or transcriptions? A
report in the media seemed to suggest that the archive is
currently available in PDF format. Is this a complete digitised
set? If digital images of the entire collection do not yet exist,
what plans are there for producing such images? Would you prefer
in such a case to have imaging done on site or can the documents
be moved to a vendor for scanning?
4. Have you made any decisions about the level of detail you wish to
capture about content and format of the original documents? For
example, in the case of hand-annotated typescript pages, are you
interested in the content of the typescript, the content of the
manuscript annotations, or both? When more than one hand appears
in a manuscript or when notes appear to be written at different
times, are you interested in capturing information about the
change in hand or time? When corrections have been made, do you
want to capture the original and corrected readings, or only the
final reading (e.g. on page 6 of the appendix: would you want the
correction only or both the original and corrected reading)
5. Are there variant copies of any documents (i.e. multiple drafts of
the same document, but with textual differences among them)? If
there are, are you interested in having the variants collated
against each other? If you want them collated, should the
collation be parallel or are you interested in modelling the
process by which the final draft was produced over time so that a
user could follow the development of the thought of the author(s)?
6. How would this project be funded and run? Are you considering
using in-house funds, or applying for money? Are you intending to
do most of the work and ultimate publication in-house, or are you
interested in working with or contracting external partners such
as academic or commercial publishers, university history or text
centres, archivists and librarians, etc.? Will the original
archive remain at NASA or be housed in a partner library or archive?
Since this kind of digitisation project is very much our members'
bread-and-butter (and our raison d'etre), we are confident we will be
able to put together an appropriate team for this RFI. We appreciate any
answers to the above additional questions you are able to supply. Once
again, I would be happy to call if this would be more convenient for
you.
Sincerely,
Dan O'Donnell
--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of
America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société
pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project
(http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)
Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/
<http://people.uleth.ca/%7Edaniel.odonnell/>
--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)
Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/
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