The goal of this project is to make the minutes of the Indiana University Board of Trustees accessible and searchable while preserving key elements of original document structures and maintaining flexibility for future use by researchers, university administrators, and other website visitors. The Indiana University Board of Trustees minutes are encoded in XML according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines (version P4). The TEI Guidelines allow for encoding of the document structure, and specific document features such as resolutions, tables, dates, and names of people. This website is the result of a collaboration between the Indiana University Libraries Digital Collections Services, the Indiana University Archives, and the Board of Trustees Office.
The encoding project began in 2001, with the first batch of minutes converted from HTML to XML by an external vendor. The searchable minutes were initially made available through the Board of Trustees website. The official project website launched in 2007 and included encoded minutes dating from 1985 to 2006.
The Board of Trustees minutes were recorded and preserved in various formats since 1838: handwritten ledgers, bound and loose typescripts, and electronic files. This variety has necessitated numerous approaches to encoding the documents. In general, paper minutes were initially transcribed or scanned, while electronic documents were converted to XML as follows:
Minutes pre-dating April 1924 were manually transcribed from the original, handwritten ledgers. Minutes dating from April 1924-June 1981 were scanned from original, typescript ledgers using with ABBYY FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) software in preparation for encoding. The resulting electronic documents were then converted to XML using oXygen XML editor and OxGarage, a web-based document transformation service.
Minutes dating from August 1981 to December 2001 were converted from HTML to XML by an external vendor and subsequently underwent quality control to ensure consistency with the project team’s encoding guidelines.
Minutes dating from 2002 to the present have been converted directly from Microsoft Word documents using oXygen XML editor and OxGarage.
Software for the project is developed in Java, using Java Servlet technology, Java Server Pages, and the Apache Struts Java Web application framework. TEI documents are transformed for the web using the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) version 1.0. Searching and browsing capabilities are implemented using the open source Extensible Text Framework (XTF) developed by the California Digital Library. The open source Tomcat application server and Apache HTTP Server software deliver the web site.
Current Members:
Past Members:
Over the course of the project, the Board of Trustees has funded several IU students to transcribe and encode minutes and reports under the supervision of the University Archives. Past students who have contributed to the project include:
Bryan Brown, Janna Carney, Amanda Cukrowicz, Elizabeth Gant, Beth Gucinski, Neal Harmeyer, Lisa Hooper, Ashley Large, Anna Lucas, Nicole Mares, Alessandro Meregaglia, Sharity Nelson, Serena Olsen, Whitney Olthoff, Elizabeth Peters, Sophia Phillips, Pam Rickly, Katie Siebenaler, Rebecca Smith, and Sara Szakaly.
