Funding Bids and the TEI Consortium
Mentioning the TEI Consortium in your funding bids
The TEI Consortium provides one of the most flexible, widely-used internationally-recognised standards in digital text encoding, and mentioning that you are planning to follow the TEI Guidelines can reassure your application reviewers of your funding body that the data you produce will follow best practices and be reusable in the future. A template explanatory paragraph you may wish to modify for your funding bid could read like this:
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a community-based consortium which collectively develops and maintains a mature and well-regarded international standard for the representation of texts in digital form that is recognised by digital libraries and archives throughout the world. Volunteers working on behalf of the TEI Consortium maintain this standard as a set of recommended encoding methods for digital texts that are used by projects such as this one. Using the TEI P5 Guidelines for our digital textual data delivers value for money in the creation of richly-encoded XML texts that are in a format ready for long-term preservation.
Where you are asked to provide a Data Management Plan the aspects of using the TEI Guidelines you may wish to highlight include:
- The TEI P5 XML format is a plain text, XML-structured format, that is internationally recognised by funding bodies, digital libraries, and archives as suitable for long-term preservation
- The ability to customise the general TEI framework for your specific project vocabulary is beneficial in reducing human error, ensuring documents are valid, and documenting the project’s use of the TEI for the future
- Use of the TEI provides significant value for money not only in potential for reuse but also in following a standard format that is easily transformable to other formats as needed
Adding TEI Consortium Membership to your funding bid
The TEI Consortium is a nonprofit membership organisation which is composed of volunteers from academic institutions, research projects, and standards bodies from all around the world. While all TEI Consortium outputs are open access, available freely under open licenses, it is important to contribute financially to the TEI Consortium so that it has funds to maintain and develop these further. Individual membership is $50 (USD) per year. In project funding applications you have the ability to put in a membership for the project or institution. These memberships enable you to bundle together a set of memberships together and come in the level of Supporter ($250, up to 5 members), Contributor ($500, up to 10 members), Friend ($1500, up to 30 members), Patron ($2500, up to 50 members), and Sustaining Partner ($5000, up to 100 members). However, it is common for institutions to take out a higher level of membership than the number of members they represent. A template explanatory paragraph you may wish to modify for your funding bid could read like this:
The TEI Consortium is a nonprofit membership organisation composed of volunteers from academic institutions, research projects, and individual scholars from around the world. By having a yearly membership of **$AMOUNT**, our project will help to sustain this important and developing standard for the future. Benefits of membership include being eligible to vote in elections for both the TEI Consortium’s Technical Council and the Board of Directors, as well members receive a 50% discount on registration costs for the annual TEI Conference, and discounts on some software and training events.
Partnering with the TEI Consortium in a funding bid
The TEI Consortium occasionally partners with academic projects submitting funding proposals where the outputs of the project provide sufficient benefit to the Consortium or its community. The kinds of things that the TEI Consortium can offer range from writing letters of support or endorsement of proposed projects to active involvement of Board / Technical Council members in a project (where feasible and appropriate). It is beneficial for both research projects and the TEI Consortium to have projects that are contributing to the work of the TEI or supporting its community. Any such potential partnerships and their details must be discussed in advance – please contact chair@tei-c.org with sufficient time before any deadlines (the Board of Directors meets monthly).