Request for Proposal, 5/15/2001

1. Project Overview

The Virtual Reading Room (VRR) of Columbia University requests a quote for conversion of texts according to the Guidelines for Markup of Virtual Reading Room Texts, which contains general editorial principles, markup and example tagging.

So far, the VRR texts consist of:

• 6,070 pages (20 book titles) of texts that we have publisher permission to use and are ready to be marked-up. (1,334 pages are in some kind electronic format)
• 2,000 pages (5 titles) of electronic versions of text that are pending publisher permission
• 2,014 pages (2 titles) of paper versions of text that are pending publisher permission
• 11 articles/excerpts of an unknown page count right now, with publisher permission

Samples of the text include "vindications men.doc", "machiavelli.doc", "The Feminist Papers" and "The Protestant Reformation" (last two were faxed). Please use these texts for sample conversion.

2. Timetable

Conversion of VRR texts are needed for the Fall 2001 semester.

3. Vendor Questions

Please answer the following questions:

a) What parser will be used to validate TEI/XML markup? Have you used it with the TEI/XML DTD before? If so, which version of the DTD?

b) Do you have a standard TEI/XML to HTML conversion utility? If so, what would the additional cost be to provide both XML and HTML versions of each text?

c) Whitespace. Please comment on whether you have applied "whitespace handling" markup as described at: http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006.html#sec-white-space

If you have, please provide a sample text marked up in this way along with any incremental cost that would be incurred for this type of encoding.

d) Do you have any suggestions or recommendations about the markup we've proposed, based on other similar projects you've done?

e) Based on the above VRR information & samples, is there a pricing scheme or estimate that you can provide?

f) What kind of scheduling/time frame can you estimate for this project?

4. Columbia Contact

Linda L. Rath
Virtual Reading Room Project Librarian
(phone) 212-854-6237
(fax) 212-854-0089
[email protected]