Para2LEMDO will consider republishing files, images, and editions from your digital editorial project, if the files help us fulfil our mission to provide open-access digital critical editions of early modern plays and if the Steering Committee at UVic agrees to take on your project. Should a legacy project wish to remediate already published content and/or publish new content with UVic on the LEMDO platform, the Director of LEMDO (Janelle Jenstad) will facilitate the negotiation of a new understanding (possibly a partnership agreement) if a new relationship between LEMDO and the legacy project seems mutually beneficial and viable.

Para3If your files have already been encoded in TEI, it will be much easier for LEMDO to preserve them; your TEI customization will undoubtedly differ from LEMDO’s customization in various ways, but a TEI-to-TEI conversion is feasible. If the files are not already encoded in TEI, we will have to assess the viability of conversion. In either case, we will not be able to preserve your interface or its functionalities, but we can help you recreate some aspects of your project using LEMDO’s customizable anthology-level CSS. Contact the project director to discuss feasibility, cost, and funding options.

Para4LEMDO considers Digital Renaissance Editions, the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and the Queen’s Men Editions (the sibling projects) to be legacy projects. They were first published on another platform (the ISE platform) by another publisher (Internet Shakespeare Editions) using another markup language (IML). LEMDO was conceived in part to provide a sustainable new home for the projects formerly hosted on the ISE platform and has a special commitment to the ISE, DRE, and QME projects.

Para5Acknowledging the historical relationship between the ISE, QME, and DRE and the past contributions of ISE, DRE, and QME to UVic, the LEMDO team at UVic will undertake, free of charge, a one-time conversion to TEI of files encoded in IML (ISE Markup Language). This conversion may happen at any point in the editorial workflow, but it is a one-time conversion.

Para6Given the semantic and structural differences between IML and TEI, the conversion is time-consuming. After converting over 1200 IML files, the LEMDO team has refined its conversions to cope with various IML scenarios. Even so, conversion requires iterative programmatic conversions; we convert, check the error messages, correct the IML, run the conversion again, check the new error messages, correct more IML errors, and so on. The resulting TEI requires some additional clean-up before we can commit a valid TEI file to the repository. Conversion is followed by extensive hand-remediation by a LEMDO team member.¹

Para7Once the file has been converted, all remediations, revisions, and further editorial work must be done in TEI (by the editor, the project lead, an RA, or a designated markup editor). The LEMDO team will not perform the conversion again if you (project lead) or your editors submit another IML file.

Para8The LEMDO team recommends that legacy projects that wish to publish with LEMDO make the switch to TEI as early as possible, for the following reasons:

Para9The advantages of using the LEMDO platform to prepare your TEI are numerous:

Para10If you and your editors do not want to learn TEI, you may choose to defer the IML-to-TEI conversion until the edition is nearly complete. However, do be aware that:

Para11The LEMDO team can offer RA support for the final stages of an edition or anthology, provided you have funds to pay RAs at UVic. Time permitting, the LEMDO team is also willing to train your RA(s).