Hi, Facsimiles, high quality or otherwise, are in no way a substitution for a critically edited text. This is true in a print framework and remains true in a digital frame. Also, within scholarly economics, facsimiles are only reproductions, and while helping with dissemination, they do not add to critical knowledge. On the other hand critical editing is highly valued because it does add to knowledge. Digital markup and editing adds value to this already highly valued product because it facilitates searching, analysis, computer visualization of the results of that analysis, archiving and adaptive reuse by other scholars.

Scholarly communication is undergoing a dramatic transformation. The abrogation of responsibilty by the scholarly community to strategically invest in technological advances to publish our most valued communication has led to a crisis. Relying upon commercial ventures to provide technical infrastructure is in conflict with the best interest of healthy collegial communication. The result is that the publication process is at risk of being distorted because commercial considerations often overshadow the intellectual goals of the product. Because these business practices are intertwined with the implementation of new technologies and its infrastructure, the problem of maintaining peer reviewed publication as the primary venue for scholarly discourse is becoming ever more complex .

New technologies could lead scholarly communication down two different paths: One offers a rare opportunity to expand and accelerate the free flow of scholarly knowledge while the other could result in control and limitations on its dissemination. The transformation has both institutional and structural implications for the entire University community. The humanities community has a role to play in this transformation.

As I see it, standards based structural language or computer skill, is essential to the health of scholarly economy as it provides a sustainable model for scholarly communication. And, it goes beyond just the markup language or information technology skill itself. The TEI consortium provides a community in which tools and knowledge are shared openly. It is at the forefront of creating a new realm of scholarly communication, blending the present with the past. Standards are the way the humanities will be able to fulfill a responsibility to making sure that their products are archivable, without which they are only ephemeral. Standards are a way to communicate with the technologies that are central to digital libraries and institutional digital repositories. Standards are a way to evaluate the quality of digital products. Being knowledgeable of them will be essential to ongoing professional professorial life, as university self-governance requires that faculty participate in service on APT committeess, overseeing strategic infrastructure investment, and, for humanities in particular, engagement with the library.

I know this is probably at a higher level of conceptualization than your original question demanded, but I see all these issues as being intertwined. As the Chair of the Committee on Electronic Resources for the Medieval Academy, I've been thinking on a policy level and feel it is imperative for computing medievalists to be recognized as central to the future of our field.

Pax et bonum, Patricia Kosco Cossard, M.A., M.L.S. currently Resident Fellow at MITH 5-8506 Subject Librarian for Architecture and Historic Preservation University of Maryland Libraries College Park, MD 20742 (301) 405-6316 office (301) 314-9583 fax pcossard@umd.edu

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