Project Aon

How do I transcribe the books?

Please note: As of June 2008 the Transcription stage of Project Aon has been completed to a satisfactory level. This information is for archival purposes only.

There are many methods to transcribe the books, ranging from manually typing in each page to using automated processes. The method that offers the best balance of accuracy against speed is using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. If you'd like to transcribe a book but don't have these facilities, please contact us.

The transcription process

  1. Join the members list if you haven't already.
  2. Announce to the members list which book you're going to transcribe. Please check the assignment lists to make sure that book hasn't already been spoken for.
  3. Scan in all of the text from the book. Don't worry too much about the quality of the resulting text (as long as it's reasonable) or being too inclusive at this point. The proofreading process that follows is intended to deal with these issues. Your job is to get the text into a form that speeds the proofreaders' work. For more details on the OCR process, see How to OCR.
  4. Combine the text for each of the pages into a single ASCII text file. This makes handling the raw text much easier.
  5. Send the text to the staff email address (contact us if you don't have this). Don't send the file in a word processing format such as MS Word or Wordperfect. It's not absolutely necessary, but it's helpful if the text file is compressed.

That's it. You don't have to scan in the illustrations because those are being taken care of in other ways. If you have any other questions, please contact us.