Leveraging eXist-db for Efficient TEI Document Management

Abstract

Professor David Radcliffe has created Lord Byron and his Times (LBT), a large digital archive of works surrounding Lord Byron and his contemporaries. The original website was unusable slow due to the expensive XSLT transformations and XPath queries being applied to TEI documents. By removing the reliance on XSL and using eXist-db and XQuery, while relying on ubiquitous and well-documented CSS for client-side styling, we have been able to increase performance dramatically without sacrificing features or functionality. In this paper, we go over an overview of the project, including challenges and potential solutions, and performance metrics of the original system in section 1. Section 2 contains a user's manual detailing difference between the old and proposed systems. Section 3 contains a developer's manual, which contains overviews of various technologies that were being used in the system designed by Professor Radcliffe. The fourth section describes technologies relevant to the proposed system. Finally, documentation and installation instructions are given in the fifth section. The rest of the paper contains a VTechWorks inventory, contacts for everyone involved with the LBT project, and references.

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