The Text Encoding Initiatives (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange had been developed since 1987 as an international cooperative project under the joint sponsorship of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. By the late 1990s, it was felt that a more stable organizational structure was needed for the further development and long-term management of the Guidelines, which by that time had gained wide recognition as the foremost standard for the encoding of scholarly relevant textual resources in virtually every field of the Humanities. Institutions with a strong investment in TEI were taking the necessary legal steps and formed the TEI Consortium, which formally started its work in 2001 with the first Members Meeting in Pisa.