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Re: transcribing handwritten materials



Hello,

As reference librarian at the Bayliss Public Library, I helped
transcribe some 19th century letters and newspaper articles for an
online digital collection.  I have responded below with our
techniques in dealing with these situations.

> I'm about to start transcribing part of a large collection of 19th
> century letters. We're building a digital library with scans of the
> letters and searchable transcriptions. There's no doubt it will be
> time consuming, and it is very difficult to estimate how much time a
> page of handwriting will take to transcribe. Having said that, I would
> be interested in hearing of other people's methods for estimating the
> time involved. Some handwriting reads very quickly . Other handwriting
> -- not so quickly, to say the least. At times I think we'll have to
> just make an educated guess about a particularly scrawly word, and
> there will be discoloration and occasional losses so some of the words
> will be missing entirely.

There were several volunteers working on our project, each of whom
had various levels of experience in working with handwritten
documents.  We were fortunate in that we had several genealogists
who'd spent many hours pouring over old courthouse documents,
so they were used to interpreting scrawly handwriting.  While
unable to estimate how long each letter will take to transcribe, I
think you'll find that the more letters you do, the faster you'll get at
reading the letters.

> This brings me to my next question. How can I indicate clearly when
> I'm guessing? I've seen some online transcriptions of manuscript
> materials where the text was laced with editorial asides in red. But
> these were mostly limited to [sic] after uncorrected misspellings. I
> haven't seen any examples of how people indicate when they're guessing
> about a word. Because we're also going to have scanned images of the
> letters themselves, I suppose I could decide that users can see for
> themselves if a particular word is hard to decipher. But it just
> doesn't seem right not to point it out when there is some reason to
> doubt the transcription.

Whenever we had a gap in the text or had to guess what word was
meant, we enclosed the word or phrase (or the part of the
word/phrase we were guessing at) in brackets to indicate we either
added extra words to complete a thought or were guessing at the
spelling.

> Another question: what do you think of using a document stand to hold
> the letters beside the computer? Naturally many letters will be too
> fragile to be stood up on their bottom edge. When the condition of the
> paper allows it, I've thought of using a stand that doesn't have a
> clamp, which might damage the paper. Someone in my department pointed
> out that the letters might slump too much. Does anyone have experience
> with this, or is it potentially too taxing for the documents? What if
> they were placed in a mylar L-sleeve or something similar to give them
> more support?

We either used a non-clip document stand or laid the document flat
on a small table next to the transcriber's workstation.  Most of the
letters were placed in mylar sleeves.  For fragile documents, we
placed the letter on a section of archival file folder before placing in
the mylar sleeve to provide added support.

Hope this helps.

Teresa Gray
Public Services Archivist
Special Collections and University Archives
Vanderbilt University

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