The Text Encoding Initiative is a consortium that curates an international standard for the XML markup of texts. The standard enjoys broad support among libraries, museums, publishers, and scholars. Web-based TEI-compliant documents are found in increasing numbers online.

TEI provides for rich bibliographic metadata in the element <teiHeader> and its children, some of which are modeled after the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) (see TEI's note for library cataloguers). For encoding bibliographic citations that may appear in a text, the element <biblStruct> is commonly used for a structured bibliographic citation, in which only bibliographic sub-elements appear and in a specified order.

TEI and Zotero are in theory a perfect fit, with Zotero able to detect and import a TEI-compliant text and, in turn, able to export to a well-formed <biblStruct> element. At this time, such interaction is still under development.

Zotero records can be exported to TEI first through export to RDF, then transformation via an XSLT stylesheet. TEI's wiki provides such a stylesheet. But this will be useful only to do-it-yourself users who know how to work with such stylesheets. Nothing yet exists to assist Zotero users unfamiliar with stylesheets. There is also a translator for the Firefox plugin, the code for which has been included in the mainline Zotero codebase for inclusion in Zotero 3.0.

Zotero does not detect a TEI-compliant XML text. A stylesheet to convert TEI tags to Zotero-ready RDF could be written for such a task, but to date no one has risen to this challenge.

And there is a TEI group on Zotero, in case you want to get acquainted with what has been published on TEI. As users in the Zotero and TEI communities build bridges to each other, they are encouraged to add new tools to this page.