iii. Preface and Acknowledgments

At the time of this writing, eighteen years have passed since the TEI first released the fifth distinct version of the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange in 2007. The release of the P5 Guidelines on 2 November 2007 was the happy result of six years of combined efforts of Editors Lou Burnard and Syd Bauman together with the recently established Technical Council, elected by the TEI community and charged with the ongoing maintenance and development of those Guidelines as an open-source project. While TEI P5 has been remarkably durable, it has survived and flourished through several infrastructure transitions and expanded in many new directions. The success of P5 can be seen in its incorporation of methods for standoff annotation; community activity supporting internationalization of glosses, descriptions, and examples; a new chapter on computer-mediated communication; and much experimental modeling that may be paving the way toward a P6, a topic of profound interest to Council members over the years.

These Guidelines have matured thanks to the stewardship of the Technical Council and the dedication of the Board over the years. The names and affiliations of all Board and Council members who served during the production of this edition of the Guidelines follow.

Appointed Editors

Board Chair

Elected Members of the Board of Directors

Appointed (non-voting) members of the Board of Directors, in addition to the Technical Council Chair

Technical Council Chair

Members of the Technical Council Appointed by the TEI Board

Elected Members of the Technical Council

The bulk of the Council’s work has been carried out by email and by regular teleconferences and virtual work sessions. In addition, the Council has held many two-day face-to-face meetings. During development, production, and maintenance of P5, these meetings were generously hosted in person and online by many institutions, as documented:

During the production of TEI P5, the Council chartered a number of smaller workgroups and similar activities, each of which made significant contribution to the intellectual content of the work. Active members of these are listed below:

Character Set Workgroup

Active between July 2001 and January 2005, this group revised and developed the recommendations now forming chapters vi. Languages and Character Sets and 5 Characters, Glyphs, and Writing Modes. It was chaired by Christian Wittern, and its membership included: Deborah Anderson (Berkeley); Michael Beddow (independent scholar); David Birnbaum (University of Pittsburgh); Martin Duerst (W3C/Keio University); Patrick Durusau (Society of Biblical Literature); Tomohiko Morioka (Kyoto University); and Espen Ore (National Library of Norway).

Meta Taskforce

Active between February 2003 and February 2005, this group developed the material now forming 23 Documentation Elements. It was chaired by Sebastian Rahtz, and its membership included: Alejandro Bia; David G. Durand; Laurent Romary; Norman Walsh (Sun Microsystems); and Christian Wittern.

Workgroup on Stand-Off Markup, XLink and XPointer

Active between February 2002 and January 2006, this group reviewed and expanded the material now largely forming part of 17 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment. It was chaired by David G. Durand, and its membership included: Jean Carletta (Edinburgh University); Chris Caton (University of Oxford); Jessica P. Hekman (Ingenta plc); Nancy M. Ide (Vassar College); and Fabio Vitali (University of Bologna).

Manuscript Description Task Force

Active between February 2003 and December 2005, this group reviewed and finalised the material now forming 11 Manuscript Description. It was chaired by Matthew Driscoll and comprised David Birnbaum and Merrilee Proffitt, in addition to the TEI Editors.

Names and Places Activity

Active between January 2006 and May 2007, this group formulated the new material now forming part of 14 Names, Dates, People, and Places. It was chaired by Matthew Driscoll. and its membership included Gabriel Bodard (King's College London); Arianna Ciula; James Cummings; Tom Elliott (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Øyvind Eide (University of Oslo); Leif Isaksen (Oxford Archaeology plc); Richard Light (private consultant); Tadeusz Piotrowski (Opole University); Sebastian Rahtz; and Tatiana Timcenko (Vilnius University).

Joint TEI/ISO Activity on Feature Structures

Active between January 2003 and August 2007, this group reviewed the material now presented in 19 Feature Structures and revised it for inclusion in ISO Standard 24610. It was chaired by Kiyong Lee (Korea University), and its active membership included the following: Harry Bunt (Tilburg); Lionel Clément (INRIA); Eric de la Clergerie (INRIA); Thierry Declerck (Saarbrücken); Patrick Drouin (University of Montréal); Lee Gillam (Surrey University); and Kōiti Hasida (ICOT).

From 2000 to 2008 the TEI had two appointed Editors, Lou Burnard (University of Oxford) and Syd Bauman (Brown University), who served ex officio on the Council and, as far as possible, on all Council workgroups.

The Council also oversees an Internationalization and Localization project, led by Sebastian Rahtz and with funding from the ALLC. This activity, ongoing since October 2005, is engaged in translating key parts of the P5 source into a variety of languages.

Production of the translations currently included in P5 has been coordinated by the following:

Chinese
Marcus Bingenheimer (Chung-hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, Taipei / Temple University) and Weining Hwang (Würzburg University)
French
Pierre-Yves Duchemin (ENSSIB); Jean-Luc Benoit (ATILF); Anila Angjeli (BnF); Joëlle Bellec Martini (BnF); Marie-France Claerebout (Aldine); Magali Le Coënt (BIUSJ); Florence Clavaud (EnC); Cécile Pierre (BIUSJ).
German
Werner Wegstein (Würzburg University), Franz Fischer (Cologne University), Martina Scholger (University of Graz) and Peter Stadler (Paderborn University)
Italian
Marco Venuti (University of Venice) and Letizia Cirillo (University of Bologna)
Japanese
Ohya Kazushi (Tsurumi University), Kiyonori Nagasaki (University of Tokyo) and Martin Holmes (University of Victoria)
Korean
Beom-mo Kang and Jungha Hong (Korea University)
Spanish
Carmen Arronis Llopis (University of Alicante), Alejandro Bia (Miguel Hernández University), Gimena del Rio Riande (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas) and Susanna Allés-Torrent (University of Miami)

Any one who works closely with the TEI Guidelines, whether as translator, editor, or reader is constantly reminded of the ambitious scope and exceptionally high editorial standards set by the original project, now over a third of a century ago. It is appropriate therefore to retain a sense of the history of this document, as it has evolved since its first appearance in 1990, and to acknowledge with gratitude the contributions made to that evolution by very many individuals and institutions around the world. The original prefatory notes to each major edition of the Guidelines recording these names are therefore preserved in an appendix to the current edition (see Annexe H Prefatory Notes).

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TEI Guidelines P5 Version 4.10.0. Last updated on 15th August 2025, revision ebf0834e1. This page generated on 2025-08-15T14:00:37Z.