L. Tom Perry Special Collections Transcriptions
BYU Digital Initiatives proudly offers full transcriptions of digitized Special Collections items for download. The transcription files are currently available in .txt and .xml formats. Page-by-page transcriptions are viewable alongside corresponding digitized images in the library’s Digital Collections.
Each page has been transcribed twice by volunteers in the BYU Transcribe platform. A trained transcriptionist resolves differences and reviews the final transcription to ensure the best possible quality. Audiovisual recordings receive a single transcription and subsequent review.
Born-digital items or digitized typeset items receive an initial optical character recognition ("OCR") scan. OCR software “reads” a document’s fonts to generate a rough transcription of recognized characters. This rough transcription and the original digital file are reviewed by a transcriptionist in the Transcribe platform.
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML tags may have been added to the final transcriptions. These tags identify text as people, places, dates, and pages, and allow scholars and archivists to link, analyze, and share textual data within a transcription.