infoSpace - Digital Libraries

Digital Preservation Plan for the Texas Legacy Project

tkiehne — Fri, 13 May 2005 07:25:49 +0000

This plan was commissioned during the Spring of 2005 on behalf of the Conservation History Association of Texas (CHAT), a non-profit entity based in Austin, Texas. CHAT desired a comprehensive plan to ensure the long-term preservation of hundreds of hours worth of digital video and audio comprising the association's collected works. The plan includes a needs assessment and inventory of the assets in place and a review of the literature concerning digital media, storage hardware, software formats, and digital repositories.

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Technologies of Access and the Cultural Record

tkiehne — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 05:44:57 +0000

"Celestial Jukebox" or Digital Dark Age?

A Question of Information Access

Technologies of access redefine the social and cultural aspects of information access. Areas directly affected by this shift include fair use of copyrighted works and the balance of control over statutory rights. Considered over the duration of copyright, the long-term effects of new access regimes could be more extreme. Assuming that technological controls prevail over the public interest in information access, several questions must be asked: Can public access be preserved as information becomes predominantly digital? If not, does our society face a scenario where knowledge and our collective cultural record will be preserved only to the extent that it is profitable?

Although we can safely assume that the printed book and other physical forms of information are not likely to disappear from our libraries, new ways of retrieving information via digital media will have a significant effect on access. Digital information objects such as e-books and online information services may be controlled in ways that are not practical for their analog counterparts. The premise of library shelves full of locked books or journals that suddenly vanish after a few readers have viewed its pages seems incredible. Yet with digital objects, protected by access restriction technologies, such occurrences are not so unlikely.

Libraries, Now and in the Future

Libraries cater to all sorts of clientèle, including children, adults, and scholars. Users rely on libraries to provide access to information for many purposes, whether for research or academics, or for personal improvement and fulfillment. No single library contains all possible works within its walls. Libraries are networked in such a way, however, that if specific materials are desired, and are physically retrievable, then access to those materials may be obtained through alternate means. First sale doctrine and interlibrary loan comprise the traditional services that a library provides to the public as explicitly permitted under copyright law (17 USC §108 & 109). Because of this, access to a library's holdings is not revoked if a book goes out of print for whatever reason or if copyright terms are extended. Once a library has an item, access to that item is only affected by physical factors such as distance, the condition of the objects, and the funds that a library or its users have available to facilitate access.

Physical limitations and changes in information seeking behavior encourage libraries to implement digital information services (Bertot, 2003; Moyo, 2004). Subscriptions to digital content aggregators and publishers increase the number of works that a library can make available without having to increase its physical capacity. Furthermore, digital information services shift the focus of information seeking from the container to the content within which, arguably, can be seen as serving the needs of users accustomed to finding information on the Internet. Whether these digital services reduce the procurement costs expended by a library over time is not fully known (Bertot, 2003, p. 222), but the benefits to the users are usually enough to justify their implementation.

Current digital services are subscription based (Bertot, 2003, p. 222), and are offered by publishers such as Reed Elsevier (www.reedelsevier.com) and online content aggregators such as netLibrary (www.netlibrary.com). As these services continue to mature, the aforementioned benefits will be accompanied by significant disadvantages. Licenses that govern digital services will be enforced by technologies that shift control over access from libraries to the entities that provide the services. Such a shift affects uses that are traditionally allowed by copyright law. To understand the implications of this shift we must understand the technologies of access and the laws that affect them.

Technologies of Access

Copying is an intrinsic property of digital information. When users view a text via a digital information service, they view a copy that was ostensibly derived from an authoritative original maintained by the service provider. Information services currently exercise very little control over what happens with the copy that is provided beyond informing users of the terms of contract and protecting the copy with basic access controls. Once a copy of a text is made, the copy can be removed from its licensing environment and thus from its contractual restrictions – the license only restricts the original user. It is this loss of control over the copies that compels content providers to pursue technological means of contractual enforcement.

Digital access controls are more broadly known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM involves converting digital objects to an encrypted form that is configured to allow access only under certain conditions. Access policies may be established at very granular levels for a variety of tasks, such as read-only access or the ability to copy (Erikson, 2003, pp. 35-36). For example, if a library were to subscribe to a publication in digital form, the governing contract could specify that only a certain number of users at a time may view the publication, which would be monitored by software designed to access DRM-aware objects. Should the maximum number of concurrent users be reached, the system's licensing policy might allow additional access for an extra fee (Stefik, 1997, Section D).

As it stands now, such granular control over a digital object is not possible without imposing excessive costs on the participating agency. For DRM to perform as described requires more than object-level control – it is necessary that the systems that access protected content respect these controls. These so-called “trusted systems” include hardware and software that are certified to comply with DRM controls (Stefik, 1997; Erikson, 2003). It is conceivable that trusted systems could restrict transfers between software and devices, such as denying the ability to cut-and-paste text from a controlled work. Additionally, “watermarking” could be implemented to prevent capture of audio or video by devices external to the trusted system.

From the publisher's perspective, DRM is an ideal technology for controlling the use of digital objects. As a means of modeling the social expectations of copyright, however, DRM's binary architecture is not so ideal. Copyright is a deliberately “leaky” system that contains many, often loosely defined, exceptions to certain enumerated rights. Content provided under a DRM-controlled contract can readily overstep the boundaries of copyright law (Cohen, 1998, p. 472; Samuelson, 2003, p. 48). For instance, a system that is programmed to prevent copying will not know how to differentiate a fair use copy from an illegal copy (Felten, 2003, p. 58). One might say that if a copy is allowed by law, then any means by which it can be made should be allowed. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Once control is removed for a legal use, how will unauthorized uses of that copy be prevented? A fundamental conflict arises between arbitrary copyright exceptions and rigid access controls.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, PL 105-304) was designed to update copyright law in anticipation of technological changes. Some of the most prominent portions of the DMCA criminalize the circumvention of access controls and the development and distribution of tools that can do the same (17 USC §1201). The statute simultaneously states that nothing in the circumvention prohibitions affects the rights of fair use or any of the exceptions granted in the Copyright Act (17 USC §1201(c)). Assuming that technological controls mature and computing environments become complicit in enforcing these controls, these assurances are rendered virtually useless (Burk & Cohen, 2001, p. 54). The conflict between the code of DRM and the code of law is embodied in section 1201. As a result, copyright is defined by contract, enforced by code, and leaves no legal recourse to do what would otherwise be legal.

Failures of Access Control

Let us assume that the current trends in rights management technologies and the laws that affect them continue unabated into the future. We can envision a time when DRM and trusted systems lock down digital information in all its forms, including the subscription services used by libraries to increase inventory and better serve their users. Every conceivable action, including reading, copying, and printing, can now be audited by the service provider and billed incrementally to the library or passed through to the user, as defined by contract. Setting aside privacy concerns for a moment (see writings by Julie Cohen), we can already see how fair use is revoked in this environment (Erikson, 2003; Felten, 2003; Samuelson, 2003). But what other effects will such control have?

Should the majority of a library's digital offerings be provided in the form of service subscriptions, collection management decisions are delegated to the service providers. Decisions by the service provider that affect the type, quantity, and character of their offerings will directly determine what is available to the library's users. One might query that if all possible works are made available, much like Goldstein's “celestial jukebox” (2003), would collection management become irrelevant? Perhaps much further in the future, when digital storage is essentially free and the difficulties with preserving the reliability of and access to such an enormous volume of data are resolved. Until then, there are several points of failure that may reduce or eliminate access to digital works. These failures may be characterized as technical, economic, and social.

Technical failure is already at issue in current subscription services. If a library has a subscription to a periodical, and later cancels the subscription, patrons may still use the copies that were received before cancellation. Under the digital model, however, cancellation of a subscription may leave the library without access to any of the periodicals (Moyo, 2004, p. 229). Technical failures of this sort result from the characteristic differences between digital and print media.

Additional failures of access are characterized by economic instabilities. Assuming that a service provider must prioritize its holdings because of technical limitations, the relative value of the works will be influential. Only a small percentage of works has an economically viable life approaching the current term of copyright (Rappaport, 1998, p. 4). Likewise, it can be expected that many works beyond a certain age will fail to be of interest or use for other than historical purposes, especially in the case of scientific works or news. A service provider may audit usage data for their inventory and determine that certain works no longer meet the interest criteria to justify the expense of maintaining them. These works may simply be removed from the service (and, presumably, archived), or perhaps exchanged with other content aggregators. Unless a devalued work finds its way to another subscription service of the library, it will be inaccessible to the patrons. Permanent losses due to economic competition is unfortunate since recent findings reveal that usage trends become difficult to predict, deviating from profitability as selection increases (Anderson, 2004).

Similarly, none but the most well-established publishers are likely to operate indefinitely. Publishers are bought and sold or otherwise succumb to economic changes. One hopes that the works controlled by a failing publisher would be transferred or otherwise preserved in some way. Since the decision is one of market value and not of value to the public, however, preservation of the works is not assured (Kuny, 1998). In recent years, digital collections have nearly vanished as a result of corporate volatility. For example, the music archives of MP3.com were nearly lost when the company was sold to CNET Networks in 2003 (Bialik, 2003). USENET news archives dating back to 1981 narrowly escaped disappearance when Google bought them in 2001 (Google, 2001). These cases illustrate how collections of digital information are susceptible to commodification.

Another economic threat to access results from the consolidation of service providers. Scholarly journals are currently undergoing a transition, due in part to the fact that fewer companies hold more of the assets while charging increasing rates for access (Ganshorn, 2002, p. 1, 3). If such a trend manifests in other digital content services, libraries with smaller budgets could find themselves unable to gain access to some or all of the available holdings, thus perpetuating the digital divide.

A social failure of access is characterized by First Amendment concerns. Removing control of collections from a local agency to a centralized provider exposes the possibility that external pressures could force the removal of politically inexpedient works. The normalization of community standards could potentially affect all subscribers to the service. At the least, a service provider would be compelled to deny access to certain works in certain locales to satisfy complaints. If service providers tend to be risk-averse, such localized measures would circumnavigate the traditional barriers to censorship that community libraries currently employ.

Taken together, these failures result in the denial of access to works that library patrons seek. These losses may not be absolute; the market may provide remedies for some of these problems, or patrons could seek alternative facilities to find the information they desire. Furthermore, these failures are not completely foreign to traditional libraries, but the effects are more acute in the case of digital information. Unfortunately, the problem indicated by these points of failure is larger than that of mere convenience (Kuny, 1998). Libraries, from the Library of Congress down to the smallest local library, contain a vast amount of printed material that captures a significant portion of our cultural heritage in literature, music, and scholarly works. The library system, taken in its entirety, represents a massively redundant, fault-tolerant system for preserving the cultural record. Reexamining the digital situation just described, no such system exists for securing digital works beyond that of securing intellectual property. Commercial services have suddenly found themselves having to address issues previously relegated to public archives (Rosenzweig, 2003, p. 752). We may face a time when the only digital works that survive the coming decades are those that are the most profitable or popular.

Towards Preserving the Digital Cultural Record

The problem of long-term digital preservation is significant, even without considering the tension between access and rights. Research in digital archives addresses many of the key problems for ensuring the reliability of digital information across standards and exchanges. Digital archivists are wary of encryption for digital objects, often avoiding the problem altogether by not accepting encrypted objects into their repositories (Waugh, et al., 2000, p. 181). Such policies will not suffice for public information agencies that provide DRM protected objects. Because of the complexities, long-term digital preservation must involve all parties, public and private, in a coordinated effort to ensure that the balance of public access and private compensation enshrined in copyright is maintained for digital information.

The complexities of the problem and the relatively recent ascension of the digital preservation field discourage the formulation of generalized solutions. We may look to policy to provide the impetus for action. For printed information, the Copyright Act contains provisions that allow libraries and archives to make copies of works for preservation purposes (17 USC §108). The intent of Congress in this case is clear, if only for a relatively narrow definition of preservation. No such intent for digital information is implied in the statute. In fact, the anti-circumvention prohibitions of section 1201 of the Copyright Act seem to remove such concerns from the public interest entirely. If the public interest in preserving digital information is to be served this dichotomy must be resolved. Provisions for digital archiving that take the restrictions of DRM into account and allow libraries to act before the format becomes obsolete may provide a solution.

Alternately, content providers could be held accountable for ensuring the long term reliability of their information. If information can be seen as an asset worthy of copyright protection, then compulsory measures for information preservation are reasonable. A public digital deposit system using trusted third parties could assist these efforts. Congress enacted the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in 2000 to begin planning for long-term digital preservation (Friedlander, 2002). Unfortunately, such support from the Federal government is rare and the effect of this legislation has yet to be observed(Rosenzweig, 2003, pp. 752-754). In the private sector, Elsevier Science, a division of Reed Elsevier, is currently involved in trusted repository agreements with Yale University and the National Library of the Netherlands for preservation of electronic journals (Ayre, 2004, §5). Actions such as these constitute the beginnings of preservation policy.

If self-archiving and digital deposit fail to materialize or to provide adequate solutions, then the basis of current copyright statutes may need to be reexamined. Much of the reasoning behind recent copyright laws is the assumption that digital media eliminates content creator's income because of massive, near-perfect distribution. Should DRM become the norm, and remuneration be extracted at the most granular level, then content providers stand to make greater profits than ever. It follows in this scenario that the exclusive rights could be exchanged for greater control over content. A shorter term of copyright could reduce the impacts of format obsolescence and market instability by allowing the content to enter the public domain and the relative safety of unrestrained distribution.

Conclusion

Preserving the cultural record as it becomes digital is a significant challenge. Technologies of access and the transfer of control over information access from public to private interests increase the risk of information loss. The volatility of digital information should compel us to act in a decisive way, in both the public and private interest. Failure to do so will create gaps in our cultural record as digital objects become permanently inaccessible or lost completely.

References

Anderson, C. (2004). The long tail. Wired, 12(10), 170-177.

Ayre, C. & Muir, A. (2004). The right to preserve: The rights issues of digital preservation. D-Lib Magazine, 10(3). Retrieved on 15 November, 2004, from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march04/ayre/03ayre.html.

Bertot, J. (2003). Internet-based library services. Library Trends, 52(2), 209-227.

Bialik, C. (Nov. 14, 2003). CNET to buy MP3.com assets from Vivendi's U.S. net unit. Wall Street Journal Online. Retrieved on 8 November, 2004, from http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106882967943658100,00.html.

Burk, D. & Cohen, J. (2001). Fair use infrastructure for rights management systems. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 15(1), 42-83.

Cohen, J. (1998). Lochner in cyberspace: The new economic orthodoxy of "rights management.” Michigan Law Review, 97(2), 462-574.

Erikson, J. (2003). Fair use, DRM, and trusted computing. Communications of the ACM, 46(4), 34-39.

Felten, E. (2003). A skeptical view of DRM and fair use. Communications of the ACM, 46(4), 57-59.

Friedlander, A. (2002). The National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program: Expectations, realities, choices and progress to date. D-Lib Magazine, 8(4). Retrieved on 30 November, 2004, from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/friedlander/04friedlander.html.

Ganshorn, H. (2002). Workshop on alternative publishing: Summary report. University of Calgary: Calgary, Canada. Retrieved on 6 November, 2004, from http://www.ucalgary.ca/library/plans/altpub/altpub.doc.

Goldstein, P. (2003). Copyright's highway: from Gutenberg to the celestial jukebox. Chap 1. New York: Hill and Wang.

Google (2001). Google acquires Usenet discussion service and significant assets from Deja.com. Press release. Retrieved on 8 November, 2004, from http://groups.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease48.html.

Kuny, T. (1998, May). The digital dark ages: Challenges in the preservation of electronic information. International Preservation News, 17. Retrieved on 29 October, 2004, from http://www.ifla.org/VI/4/news/17-98.htm#2.

Moyo, L. (2004). Electronic libraries and the emergence of new service paradigms. The Electronic Library, 22(3), 220-230.

Rappaport, Edward (1998). Copyright term extension: Estimating the economic values (CRS 98-144 E). Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service. Retrieved on 30 October 2003 from http://www.ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CRS_Index_1998.asp.

Rosenzweig, R. (2003). Scarcity or abundance? Preserving the past in a digital era. American Historical Review, 108(3), 735-762.

Samuelson, P. (2003). DRM {and, or, vs.} the law. Communications of the ACM, 46(4), 41-45.

Stefik, M. (1997). Shifting the possible: How trusted systems and digital property rights challenge us to rethink digital publishing. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 12(1). Retrieved on 30 October, 2004, from http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol12/Stefik/html/reader.html.

Waugh, A., Wilkinson, R., Hills, B. & Dell’oro, J. (2000). Preserving digital information forever. Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on digital libraries, San Antonio, Texas, 175-184.

TEI Lite History and Evaluation

tkiehne — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 05:57:09 +0000

New and disparate ways of digitally encoding texts were developed as computing became available to scholars of the humanities in the 1980s. The encoding of textual objects into a digital form creates opportunities for examining old and rare texts simultaneously and without the risk of wear or damage to the original object. Additionally, an encoded object permits new ways of interacting with the text, such as concurrent views of different versions and viewing subsequent editorial or annotations. The lack of standard methods for encoding and describing texts made it difficult for researchers to exchange objects and diminished the benefits that the digital format offers.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was conceived in this disjointed digitization environment. TEI is a successful and influential metadata encoding standard that is primarily concerned with the encoding of textual objects, but is flexible enough to apply to many other types of information objects. The standard is customizable and extensible. One such customization is TEI Lite, a subset of the TEI specification. In this essay we will examine the development and history of TEI Lite as well as the role it plays in documenting the lifecycle of digital objects. TEI Lite's relationship to other metadata initiatives will also be explored. Finally, an evaluation will be made of how well TEI achieves its purpose and some of the problems the specification faces.

History of TEI Lite

TEI Lite shares its formative history with its superset, TEI. Work on TEI formally began in 1987 with the meeting of a group of 32 scholars from North America, Europe, and Asia held at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. The initial meeting was convened by the Association for Computers in the Humanities and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with the purpose of beginning work on the problems facing digital text encoding (Mylonas & Renear, 1999, pp. 3-4).

At the close of the conference, the group issued a closing statement to provide direction for the development of guidelines. The statement, known as the “Poughkeepsie Principles,” directed that the forthcoming guidelines should (Burnard & Sperberg-McQueen, 2002, p. 1):

suffice to represent the textual features needed for research;
be simple, clear, and concrete;
be easy for researchers to use without special-purpose software;
allow the rigorous definition and efficient processing of texts;
provide for user-defined extensions;
conform to existing and emergent standards.

After the meeting in 1987, three organizations participated in forming the guidelines: the Association for Computers in the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics (Mylonas & Renear, 1999, p. 3). Draft versions of the TEI Header and Guidelines were completed and distributed in 1990 (MIT Libraries, 2004). After several years of refinement, the final draft (version P3) was released in 1994. “Guidelines for the encoding and interchange of Machine-Readable Texts” spanned 1300 pages and defined over 600 elements of Standardized General Markup Language (SGML). The TEI specifications defined an extensible set of elements that could be customized by user communities for their specific needs. One of these customizations is TEI Lite, which defines a subset of TEI meant to serve as a “starter set” of core elements to assist in learning the extensive TEI set (Burnard, 2000).

The P3 guidelines underwent several minor revisions between 1994 and 2001, mostly to clarify varying interpretations and practices (Burnard & Popham, 1999, p. 39). During this time, however, the success of TEI as a metadata specification informed and influenced the development of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) (DeRose, 1999). TEI was subsequently converted to XML and released as version P4 in Summer 2001 (MIT Libraries, 2004). Development of TEI Lite continues in parallel with TEI, the next revision of which (P5) is expected to be released at the end of 2004 (TEI Consortium, 2003, How to participate - Next version).

Formal structures were developed to guide future development as participation increased. An Executive Committee formed in the mid-nineties that included representatives from each of the three sponsoring associations and two influential researchers, Michael Sperberg-McQueen (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Lou Burnard (Oxford University). By 1996, a Technical Review Committee was established to conduct the development and maintenance of the guidelines in a manner similar to the International Standards Organization (ISO) (Burnard & Light, 1996, pp. 25-26).

In 1999, the Executive Committee was petitioned to create an international membership organization that could better handle the TEI's increasing administration and development responsibilities. The petition resulted in the formation of a non-profit corporation (Burnard, 2000). Membership in the consortium includes dozens of agencies from the humanities, education, computing, linguistics, and librarianship. Members elect a technical council that oversees development of the guidelines and funding for the organization. The consortium's first Council was elected in 2001 and met for the first time in 2002. Members may also participate in the various special interest groups or workforces that develop the guidelines (TEI Consortium, 2004, How to participate). The Consortium relies on its members to expand TEI's user base and has chartered a special interest group for training to support their efforts (TEI Consortium, 2004, How to participate – Special interest groups).

TEI is hosted by four universities and is sponsored by the three associations originally responsible for initial development of the guidelines. Significant support is provided by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Directorate XIII of the Commission of the European Communities (CEC/DG-XIII), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (TEI Consortium, 2004).

The Functional Role and Structure of TEI Lite

TEI and TEI Lite intend to define a framework for the encoding of texts that facilitates the interchange of digital objects. The specification defines a common and extensible language that different software platforms can understand and use to render the digital object in consistent ways. Although the development of TEI has focused on the encoding of texts, particularly capturing non-digital texts, the framework is applicable to the description of non-text objects such as images and sound (Burnard & Sperberg-McQueen, 2002, p. 1).

The description and interchange goals of TEI implies fidelity to the structure and content of the object being encoded. As such, much of the focus of TEI is on the structural description of textual objects, while the TEI header supports most of the lifecycle metadata functions (see Table 1). Elements of the TEI header provide creation, appraisal and descriptive metadata and, to a lesser extent, transfer/authenticity and preservation metadata. Accession and usage metadata are much less apparent, but may be augmented by the information system that stores the digital object. Rights metadata is simply represented in regard to the original object. In fact, the distinction between metadata about the digital encoding and metadata about the original object is difficult to discern from the element definitions and likely results in differing practices. In general, the file description (fileDesc) describes attributes of the original text while the encoding description (encodingDesc) concentrates on aspects of the digital implementation

Creation	Appraisal	Transfer/Authenticity	Accession
<fileDesc> <titleStmt>(all) <profileDesc> <creation> <revisionDesc>	<fileDesc> <editionStmt>(all) <seriesStmt> <sourceDesc> <encodingDesc> <projectDesc> <samplingDecl> <editorialDecl>	<fileDesc> <extent> <publicationStmt> <publisher> <distributor> <authority>	<fileDesc> <publicationStmt> <authority> <notesStmt> (also defined by containing system)
Descriptive	Preservation	Usage	Rights
<fileDesc> <titleStmt> <title> <editionStmt> <edition> <seriesStmt> <sourceDesc> <profileDesc> <textClass>	<fileDesc> <extent> <encodingDesc> <tagsDecl>(all) <refsDecl> <profileDesc> <langUsage>	<revisionDesc> (also defined by containing system)	<fileDesc> <publicationStmt> <publisher> <availability> <distributor> <availability> <authority> <availability>

Table 1: Metadata life-cycle roles of TEI header elements. (derived from Burnard & Sperberg-McQueen, 2002)

A complete TEI Lite document contains a header and text body (see Figure 1). The header, as indicated above, contains metadata related to the digital object and the original information object. The header is separable from the encoded body, which allows it to serve as a description for non-text objects stored separately from the header. The TEI header is analogous to the title page of a text. It has up to four parts: a description of the electronic file (fileDesc), an encoding description (encodingDesc), a non-bibliographic description of the text (profileDesc), and a revision history (revisionDesc)(Burnard & Sperberg-McQueen, 2002, p. 6). Of these, only the file description is required, the elements of which can be related directly to MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC) fields. Unlike MARC, elements of the TEI header are not required to conform to a controlled vocabulary such as described by the Anglo American Cataloging Rules (AACR), although such rules may be applied at the encoder's discretion (Pouchard, 1998).

Figure 1: Structure of a TEI Lite document (HTML Writers Guild, 2001)

For textual objects, structural encoding is defined within the text element. A TEI text may contain a single, unitary work, or a group of works as realized in a series or anthology. For the latter case, the text element may contain an arbitrary number of group elements, each containing a text body with optional front and back matter. Additionally, multiple TEI objects may be grouped as a corpus, analogous to a collection of texts (Burnard & Sperberg-McQueen, 2002, p. 7).

The range of elements and the relatively relaxed markup rules allow for varying granularity depending on the intended usage. The body of an encoded text is structured by p and div elements, similar to those in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), that represent chapters, sections, and subsections of a text. Text within these structures may be further encoded using a myriad of markup that indicate layout and appearance. Furthermore, elements are available for defining alternate appearances or versions of text and editorial markup or annotations as applied to the original object. Additionally, elements such as unclear allow for the indication of unintelligible or damaged areas of text (Burnard & Sperberg-McQueen, 2002). Such elements enhance textual analysis by allowing the encoding of multiple version of a text within the same electronic file.

Relationship to Other Metadata Initiatives

TEI was one of the first metadata initiatives, predated only by MARC and the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), AACR, and SGML standards (Burnard & Light, 1996). The TEI header and the descriptive fields of later versions of MARC closely resemble the functional structure of the ISBD. Despite the structural similarities with MARC and ISBD, however, TEI does not require the use of controlled vocabulary and as such does not readily convert to either standard. Early TEI development eschewed strict cataloging requirements in the expectation that non-catalogers would use the specification. The decision to conform to standard cataloging practices is left to the creating agency (SCHEMAS Registry, 2002). Such a flexible approach favors ease of use over uniformity in order to facilitate a wider adoption of the standard (MIT Libraries, 2004) - an approach that Dublin Core has also uses.

Metadata initiatives developed subsequent to TEI have benefited from TEI's success and derive structures from TEI Lite. Encoded Archival Description (EAD) borrowed TEI's header concept (Burnard & Light, 1996, p. 13). Other metadata initiatives are domain specific applications of TEI. The Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) uses the TEI framework for the description of museum resources (Burnard & Light, 1996, p. 15). Another derivation is the Spoken Text Markup Language (STML), a text to speech markup language inspired by TEI (Sproat, 1997). Similarly, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) was based on TEI (Roland, 2002).

Most notable of TEI influences was in the development of XML. TEI represented the first and most precise SGML implementation at the time of XML's development. As a result, developers of TEI were closely involved in defining XML. Especially useful to the nascent XML specification was TEI's extended pointer language which served as a prototype for XLink and Xpointer (DeRose, 1999).

Evaluation of TEI Lite

TEI Lite was created to present a useful subset of TEI that provides the elements necessary for most common encodings. The 140 elements of TEI Lite represent only a fraction of the hundreds of elements available in TEI and its extensions. The majority of the subset, besides those in the header, define basic structural and perceptual attributes necessary for textual objects, but not so many as to become overly granular. Additionally, the use of a lesser number of elements restricts the size of the metadata vocabulary that different agencies need to have in order to understand conventions used during encoding and markup. The subset represents a lowest common denominator of sorts that is compliant with and upgradeable to the full TEI specification.

There are a number of criticisms with TEI encodings. First, as mentioned previously, the header lacks a controlled vocabulary for bibliographic elements. There is a compromise between usability from the perspective of creation and accessibility in terms of resource location. Free text bibliographic descriptions, however, could prove to be more useful for scholars of ancient texts which, by their unique character, require more detailed descriptions than those afforded in library cataloging (Pouchard, 1998). The upcoming P5 version of TEI will allow external metadata and namespaces to be included in TEI documents (TEI Consortium, 2004, Guidelines - P5 status). Embedding MARC encoded data may offer a solution to controlled vocabulary problem, although it is uncertain how such features will cascade into TEI Lite.

Second, texts may overlap semantic and organizational structures. XML and TEI are hierarchical languages that require inelegant procedures to represent such overlapping structures. The overlap problem is especially pertinent to representing variant structures beyond the word or character level such as macro-level versions and variations (Smith, 1999).

Third, the reduced set of elements available in TEI Lite reduces the chance of over-granular structure, but divergent encoding practices are still possible. The basic structural elements (p and div) and their attributes may be used differently and result in confusion when encoded documents are exchanged. Numerous “best practices” standards have been created to help alleviate variation within institutions (TEI Consortium, 2004, Tutorials). The loosely prescribe structuring rules, however, demand that TEI rendering tools be just as flexible and not beholden to a particular encoding practice.

Finally, the basic assumptions underlying the use of structural elements creates problems for representing the physical structure of a work. TEI is based primarily on encoding the intellectual structures of a text, such as chapters, acts, volumes, and other semantic containers. Such assumptions preempt encoding structures based on physical attributes of the container, such as the sequence of formes in early printed texts (Bauman & Catapano, 1999). The scope of this problem may be beyond the capabilities of TEI Lite and require use of the larger element set of TEI.

Despite these criticisms, TEI Lite successfully achieves its goal of providing a readily adaptable point of entry to TEI. Furthermore, TEI Lite sufficiently addresses the domain problems that TEI was meant to solve. We can judge the 1987 Poughkeepsie Principles in terms of the current implementation of TEI Lite: TEI Lite provides for simple, clear, and concise representations of textual objects; Expression in XML allows for efficient processing, the use of non-specialized software, and conforms to existing standards; Structural definitions in TEI Lite are not as rigorous as TEI, and the user may not extend TEI Lite freely, however, upward compatibility between the specifications provides a solution.

In addition to basic principles, we may judge success by the degree to which TEI Lite has been adopted. The Oxford Text Archive and the Electronic Text Centers at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan use TEI Lite to encode their holdings. The TEI Consortium uses TEI Lite in its technical documentation (Burnard & Sperberg-McQueen, 2002, p. 2). Additionally, a significant number of the projects listed on the consortium Web site use TEI Lite (TEI Consortium, 2004, Projects using TEI) and a cursory Web and journal search reveals that TEI Lite is frequently used for encoding projects and research.

Conclusion

TEI Lite is an introductory subset of TEI, one of the earliest metadata initiatives. The encoding standard blends a flexible implementation with established descriptive principles. The result is a metadata set that is easy to apply and capable of describing many types of objects. The success of TEI, representing the efforts of scholars worldwide, has informed the development of many subsequent metadata standards and influenced the development of XML. Development of the standard continues as does its increased use in projects for a variety of domains.

References
(see also pathfinder & annotated bibliography)

Bauman, S. & Catapano, T. (1999). TEI and the encoding of the physical structure of books. Computers and the Humanities, 33(1/2), 113–127.

Burnard, L. & Sperberg-McQueen, C. (1995, updated 2002). TEI Lite: An introduction to text encoding for interchange. Retrieved on 18 September, 2004, from http://www.tei-c.org/Lite/teiu5_en.pdf.

Burnard, L. & Light, R. (1996). Three SGML metadata formats: TEI, EAD, and CIMI: A Study for BIBLINK Work Package 1.1. Retrieved on 18 September, 2004, from http://www.ifla.org/documents/libraries/cataloging/metadata/biblink2.pdf.

Burnard, L. & Popham, M. (1999). Putting our headers together: A report on the TEI header meeting 12 September 1997. Computers and the Humanities, 33(1/2), 39–47.

Burnard, L. (2000). Text encoding for interchange: A new consortium. Ariadne, 24(21 June 2000). Retrieved on 16 September, 2004, from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/tei/.

DeRose, S. (1999). XML and the TEI. Computers and the Humanities, 33(1/2), 11–30.

HTML Writers Guild (2001). An introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), DTD. Retrieved on 26 November, 2004, from http://gutenberg.hwg.org/teidtds.html.

MIT Libraries (2004). MIT metadata reference guide: TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) metadata. Retrieved on 16 September, 2004, from http://libraries.mit.edu/guides/subjects/metadata/standards/tei.html.

Mylonas, E. & Renear, A. (1999). The Text Encoding Initiative at 10: Not just an interchange format anymore – But a new research community. Computers and the Humanities, 33(1/2), 1–9.

Pouchard, L. (1998). Cataloging for digital libraries: The TEI scheme and the TEI header. Katharine Sharp Review, 6(Winter 1998). Retrieved on 18 September, 2004, from http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/review/6/pouchard.html.

Roland, P. (2002). The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). Musical Applications using XML (MAX) 2002 Conference. Retrieved on 21 November, 2004, from http://dl.lib.virginia.edu/bin/dtd/mei/maxpaper.pdf.

SCHEMAS Registry (2002). Activity reports: Text Encoding Initiative. Retrieved on 16 September, 2004, from http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/desire/activityreports.php3
?field=filename&value=TEI_D29D35(RDF).rtf.

Smith, D. (1999). Textual variation and version control in the TEI. Computers and the Humanities, 33(1/2), 103–112.

Sproat, R., Taylor, P., Tanenblatt. M. & Isard, A. (1997). A markup language for text-to-speech synthesis. 5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Rhodes, Greece, September 22-25, 1997. Retrieved on 21 November, 2004, from http://www.talkingheads.computing.edu.au/resources/documents/serge/
Sproat/A%20Markup%20Language%20for%20TTS%20Synthesis-Sproat.pdf.

TEI Consortium (2004). Text Encoding Initiative. Retrieved on 16 September, 2004, from http://www.tei-c.org.

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