The Rosarium Project: Building a digital collection on the genus Rosa using <oXygen/> and the TEI

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to describe the Rosarium Project, a digital humanities project being undertaken at the Phillips Memorial Library + Commons of Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. The project focuses on a collection of English language non-fiction writings about the genus Rosa. The collection will comprise books, pamphlets, catalogs and articles from popular magazines, scholarly journals and newspapers written on the rose published before 1923. The source material is being encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium’s P5 guidelines and the extensible markup language (XML) editor software <oXygen/>.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper outlines the Rosarium Project and describes its workflow. This paper demonstrates how to create TEI-encoded files for digital curation using the XML editing software <oXygen/> and the TEI Archiving Publishing and Access Service (TAPAS) Project. The paper provides information on the purpose, scope, audience and phases of the project. It also identifies the resources – hardware, software and membership – needed for undertaking such a project.

Findings

This paper shows how straightforward it is to encode transcriptions of primary sources using the TEI and XML editing software and to make the resulting digital resources available on the Web.

Originality/value

This paper presents a case study of how a research project transitioned from traditional printed bibliography to a web-accessible resource by capitalizing on the tools in the TEI toolkit using specialized XML editing software. The details of the project can be a guide for librarians and researchers contemplating digitally curating primary resources and making them available on the Web.

Citation

Tryon, J.R. (2016), "The Rosarium Project: Building a digital collection on the genus Rosa using <oXygen/> and the TEI", Digital Library Perspectives, Vol. 32 No. 3, pp. 209-222. https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-01-2016-0001