Day/Time/Room
June 17, 2026 | 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. | HUB 250
Title: Sustaining Scholarly Texts: A Collaborative Approach to TEI Publishing
Presenters:
- Anna Siebach-Larsen, She/Her, Director, Rossell Hope Robbins Library and Koller-Collins Center for English Studies, University of Rochester
- Chad Nelson, Technical Team Manager, California Digital Library, University of California
- Zach Davis, Partner, Cast Iron Coding; Dana Johnson, Frontend Team Lead, Cast Iron Coding
Description: TEI is a mature technology for encoding scholarly texts, but publishing those texts on the web in a sustainable, maintainable way can be challenging. Projects invest significant effort in encoding content, only to find that rendering and long-term maintenance present their own set of problems. And while XSLT has long been the default tool for TEI transformation, it comes with tradeoffs—browser support is being deprecated, the learning curve is steep, and many projects find themselves maintaining bespoke pipelines that are difficult to update or hand off to new staff.
When the University of Rochester’s Rossell Hope Robbins Library received NEH funding to modernize the Middle English Text Series (METS), the goal was straightforward: replace an aging Drupal site with something modern and sustainable. What emerged was a modern alternative to XSLT-based rendering: a Rails GraphQL API with a React frontend that harvests TEI documents, normalizes them, and renders them in a responsive web reader. The same TEI files also flow to InDesign for print production, giving Rochester a true single-source publishing pipeline.
A year later, the California Digital Library faced a related problem. They had nearly 1,900 UC Press e-books encoded in TEI, but the in-house system used to render them had become difficult to maintain. Standard XSLT transformation tools proved unworkable for their collection. But the parsing engine developed for Rochester offered a path forward. CDL commissioned an adaptation to convert their TEI into static, sustainable HTML, a concrete example of library publishers building on each other’s investments.
This panel brings together the library publishers and developers behind both projects to discuss the promises and pain points of TEI-based publishing. We’ll share practical lessons on building modern TEI pipelines and reflect on how grant-funded infrastructure can benefit institutions beyond the original project.