America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets
The materials in America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets were scanned at 300 dpi on a variety of capture devices. Song sheets with hand coloring or color block printing were captured as color images with either a UMAX Mirage IIse flatbed scanner or a Toyo 4-by-5-inch studio camera with a Phase One Photophase Plus digital camera back. Song sheets in black and white were captured as bitonal digital images using a Bookeye overhead capture device.
The accompanying text transcriptions were converted at an accuracy rate of 99.95 percent and encoded with Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) according to the American Memory DTD. The text was transformed with an OmniMark program to HTML 3.2 for indexing and viewing with Web browsers. A related database was designed to allow linking from the full text to the page images and to provide words and phrases to be indexed for retrieval.
In the transcriptions, capitalization and spelling reflect those of the original document. Where the text was illegible or untranscribable, a bracketed statement of omitted text is inserted, with a number followed by the letter 'w' to indicate the number of omitted words; e.g., "{Omitted text, 2w}" means two words have been omitted. If the illegible or untranscribable text is less than one word, a question mark replaces each omitted character; e.g., "Boston harbor c???d for twelve years" means three letters in the third word have been omitted. Where a good guess could be made, the word and a question mark have been placed in brackets, e.g., "[malversation?]".