〈teiPublisher〉: Bridging the gap between a simple set of structured documents and a functional digital library

Abstract

Digital Libraries are complex systems that take a long time to create and tailor to specific requirements [1]. Their implementation requires specialized computer skills, which are not usually found within humanities text encoding projects. Many encoders working on text encoding projects find they cannot take their work to the next level by transforming their collections of structured XML [2] texts into a publishable web searchable and browsable service. Most often these teams find the way to encode their texts with a high degree of sophistication, but unless they have funds to hire computer programmers their collections remain on local disk storage away from public access. 〈teiPublisher〉 is a novel tool designed with the aim of bridging the gap between simply having a collection of structured documents and having a functional digital library for public access via the web. The goal of this project is to build the tools to manage an extensible, modular and configurable XML-based repository which will house, search/browse on, and display documents encoded in TEI-Lite [3] on the World Wide Web. 〈teiPublisher〉 provides an administrative interface that allows DL administrators to upload and delete documents from a web accessible repository, analyze XML documents to determine elements for searching/browsing, refine ontology development, decide on inter and intra document links, partition the repository into collections, create backups of the entire repository, generate search/browse and display pages for users of the website, change the look of the interface, and associate XSL transformation scripts and CSS stylesheets to obtain different target outputs (HTML [4], PDF, etc.)*. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.