The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) at the Library of Congress houses the largest braille music collection on earth. The institution’s inventory of over 30,000 musical transcriptions cover a variety of genres, all written in the raised dot system invented by Louis Braille. It’s the only collection in the NLS that hasn’t been fully digitized, and now there’s a massive project underway to change that, Hyperallergic reports.
Digitizing braille requires more effort than simply scanning a page into a computer. Before a DotScan scanner equipped with optical braille recognition makes the digital copy, the spaces separating the dots must be measured for accuracy. An archivist then has to look over each digital copy for errors and input corrections into the computer manually. A well-maintained 100-page music book can take as little as six hours to scan and proofread, but a manuscript with significant wear-and-tear can take five times as long.
via Mental Floss
