TEI Host Activity Reports, Jan-Dec 2008
The following reports summarize activities during the period from January to October 2009 at each of the five host institutions: Brown, Lethbridge, Nancy, Oxford, and Virginia.
Lethbridge
The focus of Lethbridge's host contribution this year was membership and brand development.
Credit Card Acceptance
The biggest and most time consuming task accomplished at Lethbridge this year was the development of a mechanism by which the TEI could accept credit cards online. This has long been a desideratum of the TEI, both for membershipsubscription management and subsidiary tasks such as conference registration and book sales.
In the course of the year O'Donnell devoted considerable time to investigating and testing different alternatives (PayPal, commercial shopping cart software, different open source shopping carts, vendor hosted solutions). The alternative finally decided on involved contracting separately with a credit cart gateway (<ref target="firstdata.com">FirstData<ref>) and customising and hosting our own instance of the open source shopping cart software <ref target="zencart.com">Zencart<ref>. Once the decision was made, the customisation work was carried out as an in-kind contribution by O'Donnell.
The system was launched in early October for conference registration and selling individual subscriptions.
Considerable thought is going to be required in the new year with regard to the use of credit card acceptance for other aspects of TEI membership management. In particular, a decision will need to be made about how this system can be integrated with current databases and workflows used to maintain our (primarily invoice-based) membership list. While the shoping cart is particularly good at account management and security and Gateway interface, it is fairly difficult to customise in anything but an aesthetic sense and several aspects of our current membership management workflow do not easily correspond to aspects of the shopping cart software.
Between conference registration and additional subscriptions, the new system has more than paid for itself. Before fees and commissions, the system has brought in approximately $5,100 since October (or the equivalent of an additional Tier I member).
Membership Recruitment
The second most time intensive task at Lethbridge involved work on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-sponsored TEI-Tite-based digitization benefit. The goal of this programme, which was suggested by John Unsworth, is to develop an aggragation system for digitization jobs (i.e. character capture and basic encoding) which would allow members of the TEI to achieve savings on digitization projects and reduce their adminstrative complexity (an announcement about this programme will be made at the 2009 meeting).
Lethbridge worked intensively on this project this year: with the other members of the TEI committee (Peter Kaufman, Perry Trolard, and John Unsworth), we helped draw up a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the benefit in the Spring, and supervised three rounds of submissions and adjudication. The final selection was made in late October 2009 and O'Donnell is currently in final contract negotiations with the selected vendor. The project is slated for launch early in 2010.
Representation
- Verona (January 2009).. Represented the TEI at the workshop: Incontri di Filologia digitale. Università degli Studi di Verona.
- Lyon (April 2009).. Participant in TEI Day, ENS-Lyon.
- South Carolina (September 2009). Consulted with various Digital Humanities projects at the University of South Carolina.
- Oslo (October 2009). Represented the TEI at "Early Chan Manuscripts among the Dunhang Findings: Resouces in the Markup and Digitization of Historical Texts" and at subsequent TEI day for participants in the workshops and Norwegian researchers more broadly.
- Izevsk (October 2009). Represented the TEI at El'Manuscript 2009, a week-long Digital Humanities workshop (focussing primarily on markup and the TEI) for students and researchers in Russia.