It has been quite a while since I last went to the archives, but working on a new project now, I am curious about your routines. I used to go with a digital camera where it was allowed, sometimes later merging pics into pdf.
Now I am thinking about buying either a tablet or a new phone with a decent camera to be able to merge pics into pdfs directly while in the archives to label them correctly. What are your experiences? What kind of hard- and software do you normally use? Any experiences with good OCR programs?
Digital camera with an sd card, laptop with built in sd reader. Photograph box and folder labels for every file, then (relevant/wanted) contents of that file. Download sd card contents to laptop whenever its full. At the end of the day or during idle time (ie, when waiting for archivists to make new pulls), use acrobat to make a single binder/pdf of the images each folder. Then file those in Zotero by file/box/collection/archive. Acrobat can ocr the files but it's not super reliable, i usually dont bother.
iPhone for shooting — no flash, obviously — loading to laptop if needed for lack of space. Shoot the box and folder label at the start of a series, then sort into folders on the laptop.
While taking photographs (where able) I keep track of documents in a simple table, just two or three columns depending on particular needs. For newspapers, I just note the date and issue number in one and title, sometimes with short description of content on the other, larger column. Later, when using those pictures I'll add a file name to the title/comment column to find it more easily later.
For archival documents, I basically do the same, depending on how a fund is organised maybe adding a column for additional reference info. If photos are not allowed than I type relevant bits of content in the comment column and summarise the rest.
If what I'm using is more like a book, recently did some literature textbooks used in schools, than I'll photograph them entirely, run the images through Scantailor and make a pdf of them - no OCR but I find the results good enough to read on Kindle or a tablet.
While technologically quite primitive (I don't bother with Zotero or something like that) it works for me. Due to my work, I don't get much time in archives or libraries, but have plenty of free time in general. Therefore, I try to collect as much and as simply as possible while able, knowing I'll have plenty of time to sort through later. With this approach, when I need a particular photo for the first time it is a bit of a search but for later I have an exact file noted.