[tei-council] for 28 Feb. conf call: background on Best Practice for TEI in Libraries

[Kevin Hawkins]

All,

James has asked me to provide some background on the conf call agenda 
items that I put forward so that we can focus on discussion rather than 
providing background information during the call.  To that end, I'll 
send two emails: one giving background on the brief reports (forthcoming 
once I find out a bit more about what my collaborators are up to) and 
this one, which gives background on the *Best Practices for TEI in 
Libraries* (BP).

The BP was created by members of the SIG on Libraries and consists of a 
set of ODD files in a GitHub project, plus a few shell scripts and such 
for compilation into unified documentation. It was released as version 
3.0 (having superseded earlier documents with similar names), and a 
snapshot of the full documentation is stored in the SIG's webspace on 
tei-c.org ( http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Libraries/teiinlibraries/ ).  There 
are a few pages in the TEI wiki containing notes on recommended 
revisions to the document.

While it would make sense for the SIG on Libraries to review the BP 
occasionally in light of new releases of the TEI and in response to 
community needs, only been a handful of SIG members have found time to 
contribute to the BP.  I hosted two SIG meetings this fall (in Wuerzburg 
and at the Digital Library Federation Forum in Baltimore) and informally 
fished for successors to Michelle Dalmau and me, who led development of 
the BP, but wasn't finding any.  So we would like to institutionalize 
support for the BP's development for fear that will fall into neglect.

If the Council takes a role in the maintenance of this and other 
community-driven customizations, the Council can ensure coherence across 
them and attempt to recruit assistance from specialists for complex 
matters. Maintenance by the Council would help ensure (though somewhat 
indirectly) that the BP customizations are available through Roma and in 
oxygen-tei.

However, I need to offer a few disclaimers about the BP:

a) The encoding prescribed in the BP for Levels 1 and 2 is definitely 
not TEI-conformant; I'm unsure about Levels 3 and 4.  Not sure whether 
this would disqualify it.

b) If Council feels that materials under its stewardship must be in 
Sourceforge, the content would need to be moved there from GitHub and 
the appropriate wiki pages. This isn't a problem, but note that the idea 
of moving all TEI content out of Sourceforge into GitHub has 
occasionally been suggested.

Regardless of whether the Council takes over or contributes to 
maintenance of the BP, I would like to see the BP added to the 
appropriate section of http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Customization/ . 
  Currently that webpage says to email editors at tei-c.org to request that 
a customization be added, but I'm not sure that's correct since there 
are no longer editors of the TEI.

Perhaps if you have any clarifying questions, I can try to answer them 
now; otherwise, we can simply discuss on 28 February.

Kevin