[tei-council] Add section in TEI wiki on TEI-fluent conversion vendors?

[Paul Schaffner]

I'm a little hesitant about this (as someone who has frequently been 
asked to recommend or serve as reference for vendors).   IN no 
particular order:

-- What qualifies as TEI experience? Our main TCP conversion vendor
    is very good at applying the TCP version of TEI P3 SGML.  But who
    can say if they would be equally good at marking up bibliographies
    in P5 XML?

--  Vendor performance is often closely tied to the nature of the
material
    (modern medical records? ancient papyri?), the level and character
    of
    the markup, the length of the project (six months? six years?), the
    volume, the expected turnaround time, etc etc.  Recommendations
    usually have to be so highly qualified as to be meaningless.

-- The same applies especially to negative recommendations. There
    are vendors that we have used whom I would not recommend 
    * for our sort of work * but they may well be good at something
    else.

-- Potential liability and university policy would hinder many of us
from
   speaking candidly. Our university policy is vague (I think), but
   we have certainly been warned against offering any view of
   vendor performance other than strictly factual ("worked for us
   from 3/2007 to 5/2009: met specified accuracy rate 95% of the
   time") and even then to be careful, especially if speaking in a
   public
   forum: the last may indeed be forbidden, full stop.

-- Vendor lists are difficult to keep current. Contact names and
addresses
    can change as often as every six months. Company names and ownership
    may change every 3 years. And expertise may  change too, though
    usually
    invisibly. My own vendor list includes vendors who have submitted
    bids
    over the past 15 years. I have no idea how many of them are even
    still active, much less interested in TEI markup or good at it, or
    who
    their current sales people are.

So I guess I'd say: if we go ahead and list vendors, we should *date*
all parts of the information; qualify the description with a note on the
kinds of project and material on which the vendor worked; and be
reluctant to express opinions on quality and competence. Also: decide
what to do about self-submissions with no community references to
back them up.


pfs


On Mon, Jul 29, 2013, at 11:04, Syd Bauman wrote:
> Yes, I think (as you've envisioned this) it is appropriate. I think
> there should be a main page that talks about vendor issues and the
> AccessTEI program, then lists the vendors (with Apex CoVantage
> first), with either a brief discussion about that vendor or (if the
> discussions start to get large) a pointer to a separate page about
> that vendor.
> 
> > Do you think it would be appropriate to add a page on XML
> > conversion vendors to the TEI wiki? Of course the default is Apex
> > CoVantage, for anyone who wants to use AccessTEI, but there are
> > other vendors out there with strong experience in TEI and in some
> > cases they have lower per-character rates.
> > 
> > The reason I ask is that one such vendor is asking me how he would
> > let the TEI community know about his company. I don't think a post
> > to TEI-L is the way to go, but the wiki might be. I don't envision
> > allowing vendors to create accounts--it would have to be TEI
> > community members adding information and possibly objective
> > reviews.
> > 
> > As precedent, we list commercial software at 
> > http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Category:Tools.
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-- 
Paul Schaffner  Digital Library Production Service
PFSchaffner at umich.edu | http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/