I met TEI master @jamescummings at the unparalleled Digital Humanities @Oxford Summer School last year where he ran the Introduction to Text Encoding Initiative strand and knew it was imperative we cajole him to come to the Library as part of our Digital Scholarship Training Programme! He thankfully took us up on our challenge to get curators on the path to TEI in the space of just one day and we welcomed him to the Library last week.

The Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscript: a Digital Edition project, of which British Library is a partner, utilises a customized TEI markup scheme to capture features such as the layout of the text on a page, abbreviations and corrections.

The result has been an inspired one, with curators pleading for advanced practical sessions to be added to our curriculum to build our inhouse skills across the collection areas. One group particularly interested in adopting TEI are staff working on the new Qatar Project which will see more than half a million pages from our archives digitised and made freely available online within the next three years, so stay tuned for that!

If you too are looking to get started in the world of TEI have a look at his helpful blogpost Self Study (part 2): Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines.