Supporting the Genealogical Document Transcription Process

Abstract

Lately, genealogy has been becoming a new popular activity and has increasing interest due to the easy access to heritage documentation on internet and digital documentation. The main interesting information sources for genealogy research are different kinds of genealogical documents (census, church vital records, wills, …). In Spain, several projects to digitalize heritage and genealogical documentation have developed recently, in order to improve its access and to preserve its conservation state. Such digital information is useful, but it would be even more useful to have its transcription in a persistent and searchable support like databases or web repositories. However, there not exist any standard proposal of what must be the contents of these database repositories. In this paper the authors describe main characteristics of a tool to support the transcription process of genealogical documentation. This tool allows for easy, intuitive and fast transcription of genealogical documentation, in agreement with the contents of each different kind of genealogical documents. Given an model describing a genealogical document structure and contents, our tool supports the user to transcribe the document contents. The authors also propose a conceptual schema to model and to describe, in a generic and uniform way, the main contents of such genealogical documentation of interest for genealogy and family history research. This model should be a first step to have a reference model to describe heritage documents, to facilitate the transcription process and to share transcribed data among different researchers and databases.