Sidenote: Encoding Work In The Archives

One of the more enjoyable aspects of my time in the University Archives has been unrelated to my work as an intern. I was hired at the beginning of the fall semester to encode the minutes of the Indiana University Board of Trustees as part of an ongoing project. The Board of Trustees (BoT) meets approximately once every two months, and has done so for well over a century. My task is to utilize pre-scanned minutes of past meetings and Microsoft Word documents of present meetings to create a digital representation accessible for the public. The project has been ongoing; the minutes are currently encoded from present day to 1959.

The minutes are encoded in TEI utilizing the XML Editor oXygen. TEI, or Text Encoding Initiative, is a markup language designed to ease the display and dissemination of information. I find it to be extremely enjoyable work. In prior course work, I have encoded in EAC (Encoded Archival Context) and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and found those experiences challenging and quite frankly, fun. This position is my first working with TEI. I have been as pleased working in this markup language as I have others.

So far this fall I have encoded minutes from 2010 and 1958-59. The structure of the minutes has changed in the last half-century but the business of the University is unchanged. Encoding these meetings requires I enter the proper metadata, use the appropriate tags, and make certain the minutes are encoded in a structure easy to use for visitors to the BoT website. All this allows the University to serve the public in a manner it could not in the past.

Using TEI came naturally, I have gained a fundamental grasp of yet another encoding language. I will continue on in the Archives in the spring as the BoT encoder and have also accepted the position as encoder for the Bloomington Faculty Council (BFC) minutes as well.