Mostly I’d transcribe the documents in the archives but as time runs out, I always resort to ordering copies. I often ended up frustrated by the photostatic copies made by the archives from their microfilms. Additional frustration stems from the problem that we didn’t have a microfilm reader at the U which could output as digital images until this past autumn.

The quality of digital images provided by many archives is pretty awesome nowadays so if you can’t bring a camera in, sometimes you’ll still luck out. But it’s still best to be a quick hand at transcription!

What I’ve learned the hard way with digital photos is: have extra, extra batteries. And take an extra data card or two. I went through over 150 images, and still had more catalogs to go through. So frustrating!

The Megalomanian national archives do not allow digital photographs, and photocopies are exorbitant. I also had about eight bankers boxes of material to skim through in a week. (Oops, didn’t plan that one well, but I didn’t know how much they had based on the catalog entry). After the first day, I realized that I would have to make several more visits before I had everything I needed. I transcribed a few things, and spent most of my time taking notes on the stuff that was not obvious from the finding aids and catalogs (sort of a breadcrumb trail so I could find my way back to the interesting parts of the files).

I did my dissertation research by transcribing things into spiral bound notebooks in pencil. Its pretty durable, the material is all in chronological order, and you can add marginalia (like keywords) as you work with the notes. I’m glad I did, I lost a bunch of information from the dissertation when my hard-drive crashed earlier this year. There is something to be said for the old-school methods. The notebooks are ten-years old, and I still use them.

But, on occasion I have run into lengthy documents or whole volumes of correspondence–and there, I just pick and choose. I transcribe parts, but not all, and fill in my notes with explanations of what I’m leaving out, so that I can preserve the look and feel of that document in my head. (And on occasion, I have returned to archives to fill in with other transcriptions in those gaps.) Since the docs I work with aren’t photocopy-able, and since 18th C handwriting is so elongated and flowy it would take hundreds of digital photos to capture them, I prefer just to take notes on and/or transcribe what’s interesting to me.

On the issue of transcription: I used my digital camera predominantly for my dissertation research and I certainly recognize the disadvantages. In fact right now I’m transcribing some of the documents that are particularly difficult to read or incredibly dense. If it’s too difficult to read once, then I might as well transcribe it.

But, in terms of the archives, and assuming for the purposes of this conversation that time in the archives isn’t a problem (maybe a year or so) and cameras are allowed, what do those of you who swear by transcription do when your documents are incredibly long? Things like long reports, hundreds of folios each, with tons of descriptive detail. I type pretty quickly and fairly accurately but these kinds of things take months to type. At first, I was committed to typing but when it took me a full month (maybe six weeks) to get through just one volume out of hundreds that needed to be consulted, I had to switch to the camera.

I’d love to hear what you all do when it comes to that kind of volume.

I haven’t transitioned to digital camera-research yet, but when I go to my local, everybody is sitting there snapping away. Why do they charge a “fee” for this? Back before they paved Central Park West, a team-mate of mine and I showed up at the New-York Historical Society to snap pictures of a big box of documents–stat! The ms. chief at the time was known for barbecuing researchers and having them for dinner. But for whatever reason, he moved a huge table out of the way, spread out a green felt cloth on the parquet floor, loaned us a tripod, and let us go to work. I even learned after we got the film “developed” [This is described in the ABC-Clio Encyclopedia of Defunct Research Practices] that you could run the raw film through microfilm reader-printers for 15c/shot and avoid the significant costs of what were called “photostats.” Then the Wisconsin glacier retreated…