Norway, Digital Archives Transcription Marks

When the Digitalarkivet (Digital Archives) of Norway began their project to transcribe records for publication on the Internet they developed a system of special transcription marks that would indicate to the reader that additional information may be found in the original manuscript. This is similar to a full diplomatic transcription, a word-by-word transcription that represents the text of a document exactly as it appears, without any interpretation or editorial comment. This was especially important at the time as images of the records were generally not available online, and had to be examined on microfilm. Even though the Digital Archives now publishes images along with indexes, the transcription marks are still used. The first version of their instructions were published in 2005 titled, Kyrre : Standard for dataregistering av kyrkjeb&#248;ker i Noreg. The standard's name was an abbreviation of kyrkjebokregistrering (church book indexing).