THE TEI HEADER AND THE DOCUMENTATION OF ELECTRONIC TEXTS

The article gives a general introduction to the form and function of t he TEI header, points out some of the reasoning of the Text Documentat ion Committee that went into its design, and discusses some of its lim itations. The TEI header's major strength is that it gives encoders th e ability to document the electronic text itself, its source, its enco ding principles, revisions, and characteristics of the text in an inte rchange format. Its bibliographical descriptions can be loaded into st andard remote bibliographic databases, which should make electronic te xts as easy to find for researchers as texts in other media, including print. Its major weakness is that it does not yet provide the ability for retrieval across texts in a networked environment, which users ma y want now or in the future.