Challenges of serials text encoding in the spirit of scholarly communication

Purpose – The paper aims to describe an electronic text project involving a scholarly history journal, and to share findings related to the encoding of serials using the text encoding interchange (TEI) guidelines. Design/methodology/approach – The project was completed using a combination of in-house and outsourced digitization and encoding, employing a variety of methods for quality control and encoding guidelines creation. Findings – Evidence is provided that certain types of encoding should be done in-house, and describes a variety of mechanisms for capturing granular metadata in serials projects. Originality/value – The paper covers a number of areas, including serials encoding using the TEI and granular metadata capture, which have not been explored elsewhere in the literature. It also provides guidance for others undertaking similar electronic text projects.