[tei-council] NASA looking to digitize Wernher von Braun's Notes

[pboot]

> I'm certainly happy to still be involved in this.  That 1.50 a page is,
of
> course, going to be for clean typescript pages...right? I don't think
> really applies to his notebooks which are going to be significantly more
> difficult from the examples they give. (i.e. lots of hard to read
marginal
> and interlinear additions/corrections/notes on poor typescript
documents) 
> Do text-critical concepts like 'best text' and apparatus really apply
here?
> Aren't there only one witness of his notebooks? (i.e. if he corrected
the
> same report 4 times I think they want 4 versions of it rather than one
> reconstructed text with a critical apparatus.)

Our response will inevitably include some optional thingsss. What you can
safely assume is they never heard of something called 'best text' or
'apparatus'. These people are engineers, I suppose. So part of what we must
do is show them the kind of things you can do when you have multiple text
versions, perhaps linking to websites that demonstrate this. 

> We're basically limited to 10 pages of explanation for the main
document. 
> The things it occurs to me to include in such a document are:
> (...)
> - Note that one of the reasons that the TEI would be interested is that
it
> wants to be able to encode such texts with no problems, if there are
> problems we want to find them.

Not sure we should stress our limitations up front. But we need to explain
that there is a facility for creating specialised elements for their type
of documents. 

> 2. Preservation forms in TEI XML and TIFF (or JPEG2000), with generated
> HTML with facing page zoomable JPEG. Possibly generated PDFs?

I'd certainly opt for multiple output formats

> 3. Author (often the reports he is commenting on are written by other
> people), Date, topics, perhaps relationship to particular projects? 

They may have an ontology or something of the kind of facets they want
indexed. 
Rocket components for instance.

> 4. Depends on funding really. There are around 15,000 pages and they'll
> need to be keyed. Perhaps faster if keying company does  just the
> typescript and academic researchers add the notes and corrections in
after?
> But if done in conjunction with academic institutions it sounds like a 3
> year project at least to me.

Depends also very much on the complexity of the pages, of which we really
know next to nothing. 

Lots of text will have to be phrased as 'If it is desired that ...' etc.
or 'If it appears that ...' because they apparently as yet do not have very
clear ideas about what they want or about the content of the collection. 

Expect a proposal for a table of contents tonight. 

Peter