Reading #6

Dalmau, M. & Schlosser, M. (2010). Challenges of serials text encoding in the spirit of scholarly communication. Library Hi Tech, 28(3), 345-359.

In 2006, the Digital Library Program at Indiana University received a grant from the state of Indiana to digitize and encode the nearly 100 year run of the Indiana Magazine of History.  The project intended to provide full-text and facsimile views, improve metadata for better search and retrieval and to develop a publishing model for the journal.  The digitization and encoding was conducted by a combination of in-house and outsourced personnel in coordination with several quality control guidelines.  TEI was chosen for its strength in encoding texts that are literary in nature.  TEI's independent header was also seen as a strength for its ability to capture bibliographic metadata.  Quality control was handled manually to a small extent, but due to the limited time and budget, most of it was automated.  The experience provided a few lessons for the future.  It was the opinion of the program that it is best to perform semantic or structurally difficult encoding in-house.  In addition, the more manual quality control is performed in advance, the more smoothly  the subsequent automated process will run.  The paper suggests future emphasis on guidelines and consistent communication with any outside vendors.