Susan Kitchens' Letter Project

Susan Kitchens at Family Oral History Using Digital Tools [and I thought "Collaborative Manuscript Transcription" was a mouthful!] has a need that's very similar to my own. She's got a bunch of old letters and she wants to "scan them all and somehow make sense of them digitally". Her post on the subject outlines a plan to embed metadata into the scanned images themselves. This would allow her to use image viewing software -- she's looking at MemoryMiner -- to navigate the letter images.

Her project differs from mine in that

1. She's not trying to distribute compact hardcopy versions, a core end-product of FromThePage.
2. She needs more structured, analytical metadata than a freeform wiki-style "what links here" index can provide.
3. She doesn't have the collaborative proofreading/correction/annotation needs I've seen in transcribing my great-great grandmother's diaries.

Kitchens' needs suggest enhancements to my design in structuring articles. I'd thought about differentiating general articles on subjects like "cutting match" or "tobacco" from those on people, but maybe further categorization would be worth investigating during early testing.