TEI Members Business Meeting, November 12, 2009: Minutes

Minutes taken by Chris Ruotolo

Certification

The meeting was certified at 4:03 PM EST.

Appointment of recording secretary

Chris Ruotolo was appointed recording secretary.

Approval of agenda

The agenda was approved.

Approval of last year's minutes

The minutes were approved.

Place and date of next meeting

The 2010 TEI Annual Conference and Members Meeting will be held in Zadar, Croatia, sponsored by the Department of Library and Information Science and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Zadar.

Remuneration

The Board members confirmed that they are not remunerated for their services.

Host activities report

The host activities reports are being posted, and will be completed by the end of the year.

Election results

The election results were announced. The following people were elected to the TEI Board:

• Daniel O'Donnell
• Susan Schreibman

The following people were elected to the TEI Council:

• Brett Barney
• Gabriel Bodard
• Kevin Hawkins
• Martin Holmes
• Julianne Nyhan
• Elena Pierazzo

Chair's report

2009 was a year of implementation and experimentation for the TEI. Among other accomplishments, the TEI:

• released Vesta
• completed cooperative arrangements with ISO
• introduced TEI badges to indicate support of and compliance with the Guidelines
• sponsored several successful SIG microgrants (in support of the Ontologies SIG workshop, the MS SIG workshop, and the forthcoming journal by the Education SIG)
• brought work on the TEI Tite member benefit near to completion
• implemented an online registration and subscription system

The SIGs continued to grow this year, taking on an increased amount of important activity. Eight SIGs are scheduled to have business meetings at this year's conference, and the Manuscripts and Ontologies SIGs held pre-conference workshops.

Challenges include a decline in TEI membership renewals due to the poor economy, coupled with a relatively small number of individual subscriptions. The TEI will need to focus on cost containment, and be very careful when allocating funds in the coming year.

The current TEI hosting arrangements, originally scheduled to expire in 2009, have been extended through 2010. In the coming year, the Board will issue a Request for Proposals for hosts.

Members are encouraged to indicate their support for TEI, its work and its goals. They can do this in a number of ways:

• using the new badges to indicate which projects are "Powered by TEI"
• joining the TEI as an individual subscriber to show the breadth of our community of users
• encouraging projects and institutions to join the TEI as members

In response to a question about the ISO activities, Laurent Romary explained that ISO is an international standards body that wanted to switch from representing its standards in DTDs to using something more modern. The ISO central Secretariat has decided to use TEI XML to represent their standards. Work with ISO on this transition is ongoing.

Treasurer's report

Daniel Pitti gave the Treasurer's report. In 2008, the TEI had projected expenses of $102,000 but ended up spending slightly more, largely due to the one-time expense of publishing P5 in print form. For 2009, projected expenses and projected income are in balance, at around $100,000 each.

One serious concern is a 15% decline in membership. Many institutions around the world have been hit hard by budget constraints, and some have canceled their TEI memberships. The number of individual subscribers is up, due to the fact that people can now sign up and pay online with a credit card. But subscribers are a small portion of overall revenue, and are not yet financially significant to the TEI.

In 2008, the TEI spent about $25,000 on overhead, including account administration and financial administration, and another $20,0000 on technical and editorial support, which includes work on the Guidelines and associated tools. This represents an unbelievable bargain, as the paid work is augmented by a tremendous amount of unremunerated volunteer work. Other routine expenses include insurance, tax compliance services, attorney fees, bank charges, travel for the Board and Council meetings, as well as emissary travel for those who represent the TEI at important conferences and meetings, and a subsidy for the conference and members meeting. In total, we spent $103,400, slightly more than our projected budget of $102,000. Revenues in 2008 totaled $118,000, leaving a small surplus to be carried forward.

Council report

Laurent Romary reported on the activities of the TEI Council. Effective use has been made of SourceForge, and TEI community members are beginning to use it to report problems and request features. The Council maintains a very active mailing list, and holds an annual face-to-face meeting along with regularly scheduled teleconferences.

Council works closely with the activities of the SIGs, and helps to evaluate the SIG grant proposals. They are currently working on reorganizing the TEI website for better access to technical information, and is focusing more on evangelization and outreach, by holding tutorials, workshops, and invited talks.

Technical work by Council includes constant refinement of the TEI Guidelines, development of coding examples, and new initiatives such as the recent work on manuscript transcription. Council also provides vision for the Guidelines, shaping their overall organization and meeting and anticipating the needs of the community, while maintaining sound technological foundations.

In the coming year, Council will be working on the following issues:

• Length of term: considering whether the current two-year term is too short
• Development of existing tools, especially Roma, Vesta, and the stylesheets, and identifying needs for other tools (requires funding)
• More collaboration with related organizations, to avoid duplication of effort and undertake joint technical work where possible (the work with ISO committee TC27/SC4 is a good example)
• Greater support for communities to use the TEI
• Greater support for community-specific customizations of the Guidelines, including TEI Tite and customizations for scholarly publishing and speech transcription
• Further enhancements to ODD (will require additional resources)
• Development of "Getting Started with TEI" materials

TEI Council works well because of the expertise of its members. The TEI has an increasingly high profile, even in managerial spheres, and as an organization we need to find ways to fulfill expectations through budgeting, communication, and collaboration.

TEI Tite discussion

Dan O'Donnell described the development of the new TEI membership benefit, now known as AccessTEI, which was supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Apex/CoVantage has been chosen as the vendor for the benefit. The contracts are now being negotiated by lawyers, and the final details will be rolled out in the new year.

Initially, TEIAccess will be open to institutional members of the TEI; it will possibly become available to others in the future. Aimed primarily at smaller institutions and projects, it will provide an aggregation service for digitization jobs, using a common markup standard (TEI Tite). The pricing matrix will accommodate a wide range of materials. The goal of TEIAccess is to capture similarities among projects without forcing homogeneity on them.

Members will submit encoding jobs to Apex/CoVantage, which will price jobs according to a difficulty matrix, and run the aggregated material as a single "job". This provides efficencies for the vendor and requires less training. In turn, members will gain preferred access to qualified vendor, along with predictable pricing and workflow, and won't need a unique tender for each job.

Peggy Glahn from Apex gave a preview of how the system will work. They are developing a project portal called ProWEB, an easy-to-use program for administration that won't require much intervention from the TEI. ProWEB is example-based, so that projects can select an encoding solution that fits their needs. ProWEB will also provide project management functions, including tracking, support, and invoicing. Apex will develop a conversion taxonomy by which texts will be classified by typeface, legibility, and condition, in order to calculate the price of the job. Apex invites members to ask questions at their poster session.

As part of this project, TEI Tite will be modified and made more specific. Apex and the TEI Council will be working jointly on this. The working group includes Perry Trollard and David Seaman, among others. Council will have to approve any recommended changes.

Other Business

Approval of auditor and fee

The auditor, KPMG, was approved, as was the auditor's fee of $2,7500.

Adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 5:30 PM EST.