A new consortium has been formed for the maintenance and continuing work of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI is an international project to develop guidelines for the encoding of textual material in electronic form for research purposes; until now, it had been organized as a simple cooperative effort of the three sponsors, and funded solely by grant funds. Now four universities have agreed to serve as hosts for the new consortium, and the three organizations which founded the TEI and have governed it until now have agreed to transfer the responsibility for maintaining and revising the TEI Guidelines to the new consortium. In the first five-year period of the consortium (2000-2005), the four hosts will be the University of Bergen (Humanities Information Technologies Research Programme), the University of Virginia (Electronic Text Center and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities), Oxford University (Computing Services), and Brown University (Scholarly Technology Group).The Text Encoding Intiative is an international project to develop guidelines for the preparation and interchange of electronic texts for scholarly research, and to serve a broad range of purposes for the language industries more generally. During the ten years from 1988 to 1998, the TEI issued two sets of draft guidelines and one ‘final’ version (TEI P3). During this decade, the TEI has become the most widely used document-type definition for encoding full-text literary and linguistic resources in library collections and scholarly editorial projects. www.tei-c.org