Suggesting New Work Items for TEI Work Groups
 
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) intends to revise and extend its
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange from time to
time, to reflect experience in their use and to adjust to changes in the
scholarly and technical context.  Care will be taken, in such revisions
and extensions, to protect the work of current users of the TEI encoding
scheme.  As the Guidelines say in chapter 1:
 
    The encoding recommended by this document may be used without
    fear that future versions of the TEI scheme will be inconsistent
    with it in fundamental ways.  The TEI will be sensitive, in
    revising these Guidelines, to the possible problems which
    revision might pose for those who are already using this draft.
    Wherever consistent with the long-term goals of the project,
    consistency with this version will be preserved in future
    revisions.
 
Any individual, project, or institution may propose topics for technical
work within the framework of the TEI, whether or not they are a
participant in the TEI or a user of the TEI Guidelines.  New work items
may involve work of any description, but will typically involve:
 
*   drafting a new chapter or section of the TEI Guidelines, defining a
    new tag set or extending an existing tag set
*   revising an existing chapter or section, modifying the tag set
    defined there
*   defining standard writing system declarations, feature-set librar-
    ies, or encoding declarations describing specific conventions for
    the use of TEI tags for particular purposes
*   harmonizing the TEI scheme with some other scheme or standard (e.g.
    MARC, ISO 12083, ICADD).  Harmonization involves the definition of
    equivalences between the schemes, the specification of transforma-
    tions which translate material from one scheme to the other with or
    without information loss, or the development of modifications and
    extensions to one or both schemes to make them more easily inter-
    translatable
*   preparing a report on a specific problem, without preparation of a
    draft for inclusion in the Guidelines
*   technical liaison with other organizations
 
Proposals for new work items can be submitted to the editors of the TEI
by email, in ASCII or TEI-encoded form.
 
Proposals for new work items will be posted on the TEI's WWW server and
may be examined by the public; proposals will be at
 
  http://www-tei.uic.edu/orgs/tei/trc/nwi
 
Members of the public may comment on proposals using the TEI listserv
TEI-L@uic.edu.