Computing scholars have long realized that having a consistent encoding scheme for the interchange of scholarly electronic texts would be beneficial. Although SGML allows you to define your own DTD, exchanging documents based on multiple DTDs could prove confusing. For example, you may want to search through all the titles in a document and you have them tagged as
while a colleague has them tagged as . Ten years ago the Association for Computers in the Humanities decided to address this issue. From that effort has come the Text Encoding Initiative. The TEI DTD strives to provide encoding for all types of texts that might be used by humanities scholars. It is designed to be flexible yet comprehensive. You can read more about the TEI at their web page: http://www-tei.uic.edu/orgs/tei A similar effort has been developing for encoding Finding Aids. These catalogs provide information about a library or other organization’s special holdings. For example, UVM’s Special Collectio