• CSS — just to make it look pretty
• XSLT — to transform it into another thing (like XHTML)
• XML Databases — to query it.  a good opensource DB is  eXist.
• XML publishing systems — allows people to install software and publish documents.  an example of this is XTF and TEI Publisher.

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Hamilton encoded administrative documents and letters from the civil war. They used TEI and Dublin Core metadata with their documents (for historical reasons they used Dublin Core).
They then created a PHP interface. The Dublin Core description was used as the “abstract” for the record and the text appears when you view the “full record”. The pages themselves were transformed using XSLT into HTML and then a CSS was used to style the page.

They created drop down boxes for person’s names, organizations, place names, and geographic features.

They also included images of the page. A link was encoded into the TEI to link to the images of the actual documents.  The TEI elements that you might want to use to do this would be a page break; below is an example of code that would do this:

<pb facs=”./page/image/here.jpg” n=”43″>

Second Generation of Civil War Letters Project

These letters were encoded and then loaded into a database called eXist-db. Since the db is already indexed it makes it easier to find data.

The Dublin Core records were replaced by ContentDM. So the records are in ContentDM, his search interface is in PHP, again with drop down boxes pulled from the eXist-db. The dropdown boxes then links to canned searches in ContentDM. The “search” then taxes you to records in ContentDM

If you want to view the full text of the letters, a link in the ContentDM record takes you outside of ContentDM to a webpage. The page it links to is TEI transformed by XSLT into HTML and stylized using CSS. There are links in the TEI that point toward the digital image of the original text.

Below is a link to the current digital collection:

http://elib.hamilton.edu/hc/hcbrowse.php?id=col_spe-civ

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