Electronic text encoding marks up documents, most often those in the humanities and social sciences, in XML to capture various metadata and represent textual features important for research and analysis. It typically follows the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) scheme. Implementing TEI projects can be particularly challenging for small institutions with limited staff and budgets, given the detail and attention to textual nuances text encoding requires. This article argues for implementing such projects and their feasibility for small institutions, using Case Western Reserve University's text encoding project as a model. It includes the rationale for TEI versus sole reliance on page images or PDFs and for digitization and text mark-up workflow.