In the course of our family history research, we spend a great deal of time working with original documents. The books, papers, and other original sources we work with provide a number of challenges for us. These include understanding the documents and why they were created, deciphering the sometimes-cryptic handwriting, and evaluating all types of variations on spelling and punctuation. This can be arduous work and is fraught with a number of problems.
Some people believe that copying is copying.
However, there really are three types of copies you may make by hand, and there are significant distinctions between them. Transcribing is the act of copying the contents of an original document by hand exactly as it was written. That means including all spelling and punctuation errors and refraining from the temptation to make corrections as you go along. If there are corrections to be made in the text, it is customary for the transcriber to include and indicate these inside brackets and to use the Latin word sic . Abstracting involves the summarization of a document or a long piece of textual material in order to represent the main points or ideas.