MLA guidelines

http://www.mla.org/cse_guidelines

The official Modern Language Association "guidelines for editors of scholarly editions" provide an excellent starting point for anyone venturing for the first time, as myself, into the world of textual criticism. They offer a thorugh checklist for editors, aimed at the redaction of a "reliable" text. They also include a useful glossary of relevant terms (like "collation", "emendation", "base text", "copy text", "accidentals" vs. "substantives", "textual notes" vs. "explanatory notes", "stemma", etc.) and an annotated bibliography of the key works in the theory of textual editing.