Nancy Gohring has an article in PCAdvisor.co.uk, Google bringing search to historical manuscripts that looks interesting – soon you’ll be able to search quite a few historical documents that are being digitized. At some point in the future, genealogists could use this to search for certain names, etc. We’ve seen this done by private companies, and we’ve seen plenty of documents that were scanned, but the text was made searchable. Hopefully we’ll see more and more of this as time goes on.
History buffs can search George Washington’s manuscripts online today for terms such as ‘revolution’, but only thanks to the tireless workers who transcribed the hand-written documents into digital form.
Soon, many other hand-written historical documents could be made available for the public to search – and through considerably less effort – if a research project funded by Google and being executed by three universities works out as planned.