Transcription

The main criteria we use as a basis for our transcription standards are authenticity and readability. We therefore decided to produce transcriptions that are as close to the original as possible, while modernizing some traits to make the documents more accessible to the contemporary user.

Here are quick guidelines:

• line breaks are maintained, as per original documents;
• spaces and separation of words are modernized;
• difference between u and v is updated according to the modern use;
• i, j and y are uniformed to i;
• upper case introduced according to modern use (for example at beginning of new sentences, for proper names);
• diacritical marks are added according to modern use (apostrophes, accents etc.);
• no additional punctuation;
• abbreviations are expanded, with abbreviated letters in round parenthesis ()
  for example: no(n) = n abbreviated;
• footnotes (a, b etc.) are used to explain specific portions of a text and non-conventional editorial/transcriptional decisions;
• question marks signal unknown/unsure parts of the text;
• square brackets [] signal missing parts of the text.

Metadata

For our metadata standards we have used MODS.

• Title (English)
• Alternate Title (Italian)
• Author/Contributor
• Date Issued
• Summary
• Region
• Type of Resource
• Genre
• Physical Description
• Material
• Script
• Decoration
• Topic
• Subject
• Notes
• Repository
• Call Number
• Links

We used controlled vocabulary for Genre (Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials), Topic (Library of Congress Subject Headings) and Subject (Library of Congress Subject Headings).

Here you can download the XML template we used for our MODS metadata.