[tei-council] summary of Council taking on a role in maintenance of Best Practices for TEI in Libraries

Sat Mar 24 23:28:32 EDT 2012

All,

We didn't have time during our 28 February conf call to discuss the role 
of the TEI-C in maintaining the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries. 
Lou's minutes of our call say that we decided to defer this to the next 
meeting, but my notes were that we would resume discussion on the email 
list.  Let me try to summarize our recent discussion (see the 
tei-council thread "for 28 Feb. conf call: background on Best Practice 
for TEI in Libraries") since this could be useful whether we continue to 
discuss by email or as the basis for a discussion during our next meeting.

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3.0 (having superseded earlier documents with similar names), and a 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 Michelle and I 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 in oxygen-tei.

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

a) The encoding prescribed in the BP for Level 1 does not conform to the 
TEI's abstract model because it requires a single <ab> to be the only 
child element of <div> or <div1>, which in turn is the required single 
child of <body>.  Level 2 is possibly not conferment to the abstract 
model depending on whether you think the Guidelines say that encoding of 
<p>s is mandatory.  I'm unsure about Levels 3 and 4.  So there is a 
paradox of the Council maintaining something that is a "best practice" 
yet non-conformant according to the TEI Guidelines.

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.

It has been suggested that the question is actually not whether the 
Council should maintain but whether the TEI-C should maintain, and that 
this is really a decision for the Board, not Council.  However, James 
said that if the question came before the Board, he would like to 
present Council's position on this.

Sebastian has suggested that Lite, Tite, and the BP be made into a 
family of "canned schemas" that are distinct from the Exemplars and 
therefore not included in Roma (but still in oxygen-tei).  This seems 
reasonable to me.

--Kevin