The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium is an international organization whose mission is to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and linguistic texts. The Consortium publishes the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange: an international and interdisciplinary standard that is widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to represent all kinds of textual material for online research and teaching.
The TEI is supported by annual dues from institutional members and individual subscribers, with additional funding from grants and the institutional support of its hosts. Its chief activities include the publication and ongoing development of the TEI Guidelines, and support for their use with schema development tools, training and documentation initiatives, discussion forums, and an annual conference.
The TEI community is broad-based and international in scope, including members in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia and users at hundreds of universities, libraries, research units, and businesses worldwide. The materials encoded with the TEI Guidelines are as various as its practitioners, spanning the breadth of the humanities and social sciences and occasional usage in the scientific community as well. In addition to wide adoption in digital libraries, the TEI is used to represent manuscripts, research papers, historical archives, early printed books, linguistic corpora, anthologies, critical editions, ancient inscriptions, and a wealth of other literary, historical, and cultural material. The scope of the TEI is constantly expanding and the Guidelines are in steady ongoing development to keep pace with the emerging needs of the TEI community.