How are/were the online directories created, structured and delivered?
The directories offered as part of the Boston Streets Collection all were originally scanned from printed directory sources available for consultation at the Tisch Library, Tufts University and The Bostonian Society Library. Scans of the directories from to cover to cover, or in sections (personal A-Z listings, Advertisements, etc.) were made at the Digital Collections and Archives from late 2002 through 2004. Sections to be converted from images to text files were sent out to DigitalDivideData for double-key data entry and quality assurance processes. Once the page images of A-Z listings had been converted into text files, the project staff began the mark-up process, following the Text Encoding Intiative’s P4 XML guidelines. Text editors were used to execute regular expression-based global search and replacement processes on the data, while programmers on staff aided in the “chunking” of directories by last name. Once the text files were transformed into highly-tagged well-formed XML
