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

[James Cummings]

> 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.

Might point is that we don't need to demonstrate that, because as far as I'm aware they don't have multiple text versions.  I think discussing such things will only confuse the issues.  They have single texts with handwritten annotations on them. (I'm not claiming in the 15,000 documents that there might not be two versions of the same text, and early draft and a later one, but from what I'm able to glean this isn't the main point of the notes.)

> 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.

True. I was just thinking in terms of justification for why a perceived standards body would be wanting to get involved in projects like this. (to test and improve if necessary)

> I'd certainly opt for multiple output formats

Seems reasonable. We should stress the (obvious to us) point that the TEI XML form would be a central format which could be used to great these output formats, generate the input for databases, or what have you.  That idea is quite foreign to some people.

> > 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.

Sure, quite easy to do with each document as a single file. So I guess we point out the tei:keywords and friends as a method of storing this information.

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

I agree.  Some of them are masses of handwritten comments and sketches, but from the sounds of it most are (poor quality -- probably mimeographed) typescript with his marginal and interlinear notes. I think we can only proceed on that basis. Some pages have lots of notes, some have none at all, but you are right that without knowing the collection in more depth it is difficult to comment. 

> 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.

I think they have this mass of scans of them, but then don't know what to do with it.

> Expect a proposal for a table of contents tonight.

For the record I'm on holiday until the 17th so may not have a chance to contribute until then. (But look forward to seeing it then!)

-James