[tei-council] Vault migration progress

Lou Burnard lou.burnard at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Thu Jan 21 16:49:28 EST 2010


This really is quite a difficult set of issues here.

First off, in the case of edr01,  I'm not certain that converting the 
"ugly ASCII" conventions was that wise, partly because you leave other 
aspects of the markup (.sk .co)  untouched, but mainly because the 
comment about the accents at the start of the text is now mystifying.
(and the file doesnt display properly in my web browser anyways, because 
it looks like an ASCII file, not a UTF8 one)

Secondly, I wonder if it helps to distinguish form and function when 
considering the links? It's (just about) possible to preserve the 
function of internal links if we know how to decode the form they take, 
and we're probably not over concerned about the exact form they took 
originally anyway (though I suppose we might be...). It's just not 
possible to preserve the function of an external link because the thing 
it's pointing to either isn't there at all, or if it is has now moved on 
entirely. (OK, you might say we should point into places on the Internet 
Archive or something...)

So I'm not sure. I think I agree that tidying up internal links is 
reasonable and helpful. I feel quite strongly that we shouldn't mess 
with external links: it's quite a major editorial act to say that this 
link is actually to this other document.

Can't comment on the "removal of control characters" without more details.



  Kevin Hawkins wrote:
>  From an archival standpoint, I think it is best not to correct any 
> links in documents in the Vault.  That would be manipulating the 
> historical record in a way that will make it even more difficult for 
> future researchers to imagine what the authors of these documents were 
> referring to at the time.  Fixing internal links only is okay if it's 
> needed for documents to let users get from one document to another, 
> though I don't think it's actually required.
> 
> I think it's acceptable to fix character encoding (as you have) in order 
> to make these documents readable by contemporary software.  We are 
> offering an archive for users, after all -- not a preservation-quality 
> bitstream.
> 
> Kevin
> 
> David Sewell wrote:
>> Council-folk,
>>
>> I have been working on the migration of the TEI Vault to the Virginia
>> server at www.tei-c.org. The files are in place and basically all
>> working. I spent some time cleaning up control characters in text files
>> (which often cause Apache to treat them as binary), tweaking MIME content
>> types, and as a gift to Lou converting some ugly ASCII-7 French
>>
>> http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/teiweb/Vault/ED/edr01.txt
>>
>> to UTF-8
>>
>> http://www.tei-c.org/Vault/ED/edr01.txt
>>
>> I am fixing broken internal links, where possible, but I'd like to know
>> what Council wants done with broken external ones. For example, most of
>> the links on this page
>>
>> http://www.tei-c.org/Vault/ED/edr14.html
>>
>> are invalid. The ones to www.uic.edu can mostly be mapped to current
>> pages on www.tei-c.org. Undoubtedly many external links are gone
>> forever.
>>
>> Should I take the time to fix those, where possible? The number is not
>> huge, ca. 60 in all. Users will not expect all the links to be working
>> but will be pleased if they are.
>>
>> Please copy me on any reply as I am not subscribed to Council list now,
>>
>> David
>>
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