Here's an idea...
Some of you may have seen today's (and previous)
Slashdot links on reCaptcha, a cool idea
that's starting to be more commonly-used: 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7023627.stm
http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

Basically they're using a CAPTCHA to digitize old
scanned books.[1] 

This could be applied to handwritten historic records.
However, it might be hard to trust regular schmoes to
correctly transcribe handwritten historic texts.  One
way to address this might be to just ask more people
the same word, and if they all (or mostly) match, we
can be fairly certain it's transcribed correctly.
Or this could just be used to verify a previous manual
transcription.

Thoughts?

-Jon



[1] FYI, a CAPTCHA is where you have to type
a distorted word - to stop spammers & hackers.  For
example, when you mistype your password to enter gmail
or yahoo mail enough times, it'll require you to type
in a word that's blurred.  The new application of this
anti-spam technique is to use scanned books as the
source of words.



       
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