Glen Worthey, digital humanities librarian and head of SUL's Digital Initiatives Group (DIG) was recently elected to serve a two-year term on the Board of Directors of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, an international organization whose mission is "to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and linguistic texts."

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, was originally established "to develop, maintain, and promulgate hardware- and software-independent methods for encoding humanities data in electronic form."  It was one of the earliest, and has proven to be one of the most successful, efforts in worldwide digital humanities, creating and maintaining the universally-used Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.

The TEI's impact has been incomparable not only in the world of the digital humanities, but also in the information revolution at large: the creation and adoption of the TEI way of working with digital text was a direct progenitor of the XML standard itself.  The XML specification itself was co-edited by Stanford alum Michael Sperberg-McQueen, who was one of the original co-creators of the TEI.

Glen joins a group of eight directors from around the world, who are actively working to promote the use and appreciation of text encoding standards and best practices.