The Bodleian TEI Catalogue Consolidation Project -- Poster for DH2017
Creators: name: Cummings, James
name: Hankinson, Andrew
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2017
Subjects: TEI XML
Bodleian Libraries
Manuscript Description
Consolidation
Conversion

description: The Bodleian TEI Catalogue Consolidation Project: James Cummings and Andrew Hankinson The Bodleian’s TEI Catalogue Consolidation project was a joint Bodleian / IT Services project at the University of Oxford, designed to implement a single consolidated and sustainable infrastructure for delivering TEI manuscript description catalogues. The project incorporated user research, scoping, technical design, implementation, user testing, and subsequent iteration. The aims of the project were to determine a suitable technical architecture for the storage and indexing of TEI manuscript descriptions across multiple collections; engage in user testing of the existing TEI-based catalogues at the Bodleian and decide on the functional improvements required for the front end interface(s); build or implement the ‘back-end’ technical architecture as scoped; build a new, user-friendly interface for searching and browsing TEI; and design and implement a sustainability plan around training, communications and standards. This poster will concentrate on the technical framework, joint schema design, and legacy data migration of existing catalogues and where this fits in the overall technical systems of the Bodleian Library’s consolidated infrastructure for TEI manuscript description catalogues. The Bodleian Libraries holds well over 20,000 manuscripts and serves readers from all academic divisions of the University of Oxford as well as thousands of external readers from around the world. More than half of the manuscript collections in the Bodleian are effectively hidden from scholars because they are not described online, or because the existing descriptions are not well indexed or even available to users. To try to solve this problem, the Bodleian spent five years creating TEI-based catalogues for descriptions of its manuscripts. However, the result was eight separate TEI catalogues, the largest of which (FIHRIST) is the union catalogue for the description of Islamic manuscripts in the UK. Seven other catalogues (Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Shan, and Genizah) represent portions of the Bodleian Libraries Oriental collections. The most recent addition is the TEI catalogue for western medieval manuscripts, funded by The Tolkien Trust. Prior to the consolidation project, small improvements were made to each subsequent catalogue, but funding was not available to rollout those improvements retrospectively, or to consolidate the code base. TEI is rapidly becoming the de-facto language for encoding descriptions of manuscripts collections (in the Bodleian and internationally) and this project was an opportunity to build on its use in a concrete way, by providing a clear set of software, guidelines, and training capacities for the large number of staff engaged with describing manuscripts. Consolidating this infrastructure has significantly lowered the operating costs of support and feed directly in the University’s strategy for enhancing access to collections. As part of the project, the existing TEI manuscript description schemas were consolidated into a single TEI customization. By using TEI, the catalogue descriptions were made more easily expandable to include full transcriptions of manuscripts, leading the way towards the mark-up and extraction of important biographical, geographical, and scientific data. In addition the existing catalogue descriptions were migrated to this single TEI customization. As well as showcasing the project as a whole, the poster will focus on the consolidation process including the key aims and objectives of the project, which were: To decide on a technical architecture for the storage and indexing of TEI-XML manuscript descriptions across multiple collections. Engage in user testing of the existing TEI-based catalogues atthe Bodleian to decide the functional improvements required for the front end interface(s). Develop a technical requirements document with the necessary details to implement the recommendations during the subsequent buildproject. Build the ‘back-end’ technical architecture as scoped. Build a new user-friendly public interface for searching and browsing the TEI. Migrate the existing TEI applications into the new solution. Design and implement a sustainability plan around training, communications and standards. The poster will explain the project, the process used for schema consolidation, legacy data migration, and the overall technical infrastructure.