Digital Editions

Beginning in 2024, all new digital editions of the Middle English Text Series are marked up using the TEI encoding scheme. Raw files, PDFs, correction logs, and other documentation, including the TEI library and metadata dictionary, can be downloaded from the METS GitHub repository.

NB: Legacy editions will be encoded over time after the launch of this site. Once they go through the encoding process, new versions will be uploaded to this website and raw files will be added to GitHub.

METS editions appeared online soon after the Series’ founding in 1990. As the Rossell Hope Robbins Library had already built a robust digital infrastructure for The Camelot Project and other digital resources, METS and River Campus Libraries staff were able to adapt existing digital infrastructure to METS’ particular needs. The goal at the outset was to replicate the layout of the print volumes as closely as possible. Staff developed a system that required hard-coding tables of text and notes in HTML, first on a Cold Fusion site and, after 2010, on Drupal.

This Drupal-based system quickly became unsustainable and, in 2019, the Board and staff decided that the digital edition was in need of a complete redesign in order to meet current best practices and standards for sustainability and accessibility. At the same time, we decided to completely redesign our production practices for both print and digital editions. After several years of development and user assessment, we partnered with Cast Iron Coding to build a new site and digital edition that would update our user experience, enable users to access a wide range of data types, and would be easy to update, as well as sustainable and accessible for users and staff. As part of this transformation, staff have updated and created metadata for each text and edition and have created version and correction logs, including (when possible) the names of each staff member that worked on an edition and their contributions.

This website is built on Craft CMS. It uses an API (GraphQL and Ruby on Rails) to model, transform, and display the encoded editions for users when they open the reader view. 

TEI tags are used both for textual and digital formatting and to tag data that might be of interest to users. Because the level of editorial intervention in METS texts generally exceeds that of most documents encoded in TEI, we have developed a fairly restricted set of tags. Our hope is that by making the raw files available via GitHub, users will develop and implement their own tagging schema. The main categories of content tags are:

• Names
  • Animal
  • Persons
• Dates
• Places
• Speakers (within Drama texts)
• Languages
• Foliation

Apart from style tags necessary for formatting, only the primary texts are tagged. Introductions and apparatus are not tagged. Currently, TEI tags are not indexed within the site itself; users interested in searching across texts via tags need to download the raw files from GitHub. This may change in a future phase of the project.

Please note that all METS editions published from 2024 onward have full TEI markup. Our goal is to update all legacy editions by December 2027; we will upload newly encoded editions to this website and GitHub as they are completed. Each edition is tagged as either "Legacy HTML" or "TEI XML" to aid users in navigating edition data.

The full TEI element dictionary is available in our GitHub repository. 

Each METS text and edition is assigned metadata, which is used by the site's search functionality. This metadata includes standard bibliographic information, such as title and year of publication. It also includes contributors (medieval authors, modern editors and translators, illustrators, etc.), language, time period, and form (poetry, prose, mixed poetry and prose, drama, music, codex). To enhance searching even further, texts and editions are assigned additional genre tags (examples include: complaint, apocrypha, fabliau, motet). For full definitions of these tags, users can access our complete data dictionary on GitHub. Users can also view the metadata for texts and editions in the metadata spreadsheet.

Users can utilize filters in their searching by navigating to either the Texts or Editions lists. By selecting options in the filter pane on the right side of the screen, users can narrow searches to 14th-century Anglo-Norman fabliau, for example, or 15th-century Middle English complaints. 

In 2023, John Dewees (Senior Digital Asset Management Specialist, River Campus Libraries) worked with METS staff to implement a preservation strategy for METS digital editions. The strategy encompasses:

• Past digital editions, with accompanying strategies for poorly supported file formats
• New digital editions
• The establishment of a set of records in Alma representing the digital editions, rather than using print records to represent both physical and digital versions of the file.

Over the course of 2023, the Digital Asset Management department undertook the following actions:

• Migrated WordPerfect (*.wpd) files to OpenDocument text files (*.odt) for preservation, Word Document text files (*.docx), and PDF (*.pdf) for access
• Migrated PageMaker (*.p65) files to HTML
• Ran PDFs through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) workflow when possible;
• Ingested existing digital assets into Preservica, including relevant audio files. 

All future editions will be ingested into Preservica, River Campus Libraries’ digital preservation platform.

NB: Researcher access to digital files is provided through our new website and GitHub repositories. The digital assets stored in Preservica should only need to be accessed in the case of a catastrophic failure of some kind in which the access versions are lost. In other words, Preservica is acting purely as a digital preservation platform and not a digital collections access platform.

METS shares the University of Rochester's commitment to digital accessibility and inclusivity, and adheres to the University's digital accessibility policy. This website conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility guidelines.  Future phases of the project will use WCAG 3 criteria as guiding principles.