My family has a number of diaries from one of our relations which have spent the last 75 years in an attic, I am now looking to preserve them.
The diaries cover from the first boer war through to the 1920's, each volume is bound and each is written in Pitman's short hand.
My first priority is to digitise the collection with the computer able to recognise the characters on the page. As each volume is bound I can't send multiple pages through a scanner at once, my current thinking is to you use a 'scanning' app on my phone (basically taking a photo of each page) so I can move through each volume reasonably quickly.
Secondly I need to translate the diaries. My grandmother has translated a few pages and found some gems such as the first motor vehicle to come to the village and the death of Queen Victoria but there is plenty more to do. My hope is technology will one day come to the rescue and as long as I have digitised the collection some form of translate service will become available, if not at least the collection is safe and if a family member on day choses to learn Pitman the collection is accessible.
Does anyone have any experience with this? The size of the collection makes this a daunting task but I feel it would be a great shame to lose such an interesting insight into history. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Handheld scanners are getting much better and much cheaper, but look, though Optical Character Recognition software may also be getting better, so far the results I see of its application to even printed text are very mixed. I have never used it without it generating errors, and in sites that feature un-corrected scanned text there is often enough scrambling and typos to make the text very hard to use. So, do not assume that a Pitman or Palmer decoder app that will work with handwriting is going to be appearing soon, or will be without bugs. BUT , that said, digitizing your documents even as image files is a great idea. Save the data first, the rest can wait.
I might also suggest a common low-effort way people sometimes get translations. For someone reasonably quick in reading Pitman, it would be pretty simple to put a recorder in their hands and have them read the text out loud, then type it up yourself later. That way you don't demand a lot of typing from someone who could be a volunteer, and they can translate a lot of text quickly.