How does one transcribe the columns in the Tide Tables? Can someone post an example?
We have some brief guidance on transcribing tables in our Unusual Text section of How-To. The most frequent tables we see are account books, but the advice applies to the tide tables as weel:
Transcribe these in a way that will preserve the relationships between columns and rows, and reflect the meaning of the original documents. Don’t worry about replicating layout, just try to capture the data and make your transcription relatively easy for a reviewer to check. You can use spaces and hard returns, but please do not add characters such as the pipe symbol or slashes to divide the data.
The tide tables are generally organized in two columns, so please transcribe these one after the other, as you would for newspaper columns. Otherwise, just keep it as simple as you can: transcribe the text as you see it, line by line and don’t try to replicate the formatting.
As with most of our text, the primary use will be search, so the most important thing is capturing the words, which will help searchers of the library of congress digital collections to find their way to this item.