TEI: Yesterday's information tomorrow

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines are an international and interdisciplinary standard that enables libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to represent a variety of literary and linguistic texts for online research, teaching, and preservation.

The TEI standard is maintained by a Consortium of leading Institutions and Projects worldwide. Information on projects which use the TEI, who is a member, and how to join, can all be found via the links above. Consortium members contribute to its financial stability and elect members to its Council and Board.

The Guidelines are the chief deliverable of the TEI Consortium, along with a range of tutorials, case studies, presentations, and software developed for or adapted to the TEI. The latest release of the Guidelines under development is P5. The web versions of the Guidelines, the schemas and DTDs are released under the GPL (General Public Licence), and associated XSLT stylesheets are released under the Lesser GPL; this is explained in theTEI licencing document.

The TEI was originally sponsored by the Association of Computers in the Humanities (ACH), the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). Major support has been received from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the European Community, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Want to become active in the TEI Community? Join a Special Interest Group, sign up for the mailing list, and come to our annual meetings. For help including the TEI in your next grant proposal, consider our grant assistance program.

The seventh Annual Members' Meeting will be held November 1-3, 2007, at the University of Maryland, USA. See the announcement and call for papers.