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Lou Burnard has worked at the interface between information technology and the humanities since the 1970s. He spent many years designing and implementing database systems for research and teaching, and in running the Oxford Text Archive, an early prototype for what we now know as the digital library. He first heard the word SGML some time around 1987, during the planning stages of what was to become the international Text Encoding Initiative. Since March 1990, he has been European editor of the TEI, and had the pleasure of handing Charles Goldfarb a copy of the first edition of that Initiative's work, co-edited with Michael Sperberg-McQueen, at SGML Europe 1994. More recently he participated as a member of the extended workgroup which defined XML, and has been active in promoting and teaching XML and SGML in the academic context. Other recently published work includes the British National Corpus, a one hundred million word corpus of modern British English, for which he helped develop SARA, the SGML-Aware Retrieval Application. He is currently working with two different groups trying to develop SGML-based standards for the detailed cataloguing and description of medieval manuscripts, and with a UK library project investigating metadata needs for long term preservation of digital resources. |