Developing text standards

Text handling has so far played a relatively minor role in museum documentation and information handling systems, but as we move towards the age of multimedia and network-based information systems, the need for standard formats for text is increasingly apparent. Multimedia includes the linking of objects and descriptions of objects to primary and secondary textual sources and the same textual source may be linked to many different objects. Taking the multimedia environment to its logical extension we can envisage the distributed multimedia system where information is held in different locations and is accessed over the network and used for different purposes, whilst still being linked together. Some agreed commonality of format for that information, whether it is text, image or sound, is therefore essential for the usefulness, development and longevity of the data. This paper discusses the particular nature of text and methods of handling it, and examines current thinking in text standards. The term 'electronic text' will be used to mean anything textual in electronic form.