The Bancroft Library, working under the direction of Prof. Charles Faulhaber, undertook sponsorship of a TEI-compliant DTD for the transcription of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, here termed ds3.dtd. At successive moments, Michael Sperberg-McQueen (1998) and David Seaman (2001) devised use of elements and provided documentation. During the year 2002, Sharon K. Goetz (University of California, Berkeley, Department of English) reviewed, revised and presented the transcription DTD in several workshops at Berkeley.

The purpose of ds3.dtd is to help individual scholars and students produce machine-readable transcriptions of medieval and renaissance manuscripts in a format compatible with the TEI Guidelines. Relevant issues are therefo0re a combination of textual questions (e.g., prose, verse, corrections, omissions) and physical questions (e.g., change of hand, change of link, illegibility due to loss of support of due to deterioration of ink).