Brown University

The libraries of Brown University and Wheaton College will collaborate to offer a new shared repository and a suite of publishing and preservation services for humanities scholars who wish to create electronic texts using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. TEI encoding offers both scholars and readers significantly wider ranges of options for annotating, searching, linking, and using digital texts encoded by the scholars. However, creating, preserving, and providing access to a TEI-encoded text can be very costly and time-consuming. The new centralized TEI Archiving, Publication and Access Service (TAPAS) responds to an urgent need, particularly at small liberal arts colleges, for solutions that do not require extensive technical resources or large-scale funding. A community-driven and contributory project, TAPAS will enable scholars to share data presentation tools within TAPAS and with the public. The resulting archive will permit broad access and support third-party interface development.