From the main page, the practice paleography documents can be found under "Tutorial" and "Further practice". Under the former, the 10 documents are arranged according to level of difficulty to decipher while those in the latter are ordered according to when they were written (e.g., 16th century). The documents appear to be chosen by several criteria: variety (for instance, some are court documents, others are recipes and songs), level of difficulty for the modern reader to read, and era written. The below left image is a detail from a 1554 letter written in the italic hand from Elizabeth I to Queen Mary I. This document is considered the easiest to read of the ones offered. In contrast, the image below right is 1760 parliamentary document written in the Chancery hand is considered difficult to read.
The National Archive did an excellent job of offering the user a variety of methods to practice paleography. She can participate through the "Interactive transcribing exercise" that goes line-by-line through a document in JPG format, and lets the user know how accurate she was in her transcription. The user can also look at the document as a JPG in a separate window. All of the lines have been numbered (obviously something not possible with the physical documents) and allow the viewer to scroll around sections of the document and zoom in quite close. However, this does require the installation of Adobe Flash Player 9. The zoom capability is crucial for the user to be able to see individual characters on the documents. The archive has also offered the possibility of printing out the document as a PDF.
The metadata for each document is scattered around and not always apparent. When a user selects a document, she will get a brief historical background on the document type, subject matter, and handwriting style. However, to see the catalog reference number and the copyright/author information, the user must scroll over the image detail or view the un-zoomed image in a pop-up window. I believe such metadata is not considered crucial for the purposes of this digitization project. Rather, the user is more interested in the handwriting rather than the textual content. No information on how the documents were scanned is provided.
This digitization project is intended for those who are interested in English history and/or handwriting. The project is designed for continuous usage, as there are many lessons that clearly would take many hours and a great deal of mental effort. The National Archive tries to make it fun and interactive through the interactive transcribing exercises and the slightly morbid ducking stool game (save a 17th-c. woman from drowning by correctly transcribing words!).
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