Transliteration - Before you, the coordinator, begin the work of translation, decide on a transliteration method, which will be most important for proper names of people and towns. If you use a professional translator, work this out in advance; if you have a team of volunteers, if at all possible provide them with the method and examples of names of people and towns that will appear frequently and how you wish the names to be transliterated. If that is not possible before the translation begins, then you will need to edit/proofread the translated material after it is submitted to you and before you submit it to us to go online to ensure internal consistency. Be aware that there are many spelling variants and some are based on the geographical area in which the writer or translator came from. It is, therefore, a good practice to describe in an introduction your transliteration method.

Town name - The current spelling of the town name will appear at the index page at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/translations.html and can be found by doing a search of the yizkor book database at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/database.html. Internally, in the actual translation, you may, of course, use the Yiddish version of the name if you wish as this is the way many of the readers will identify the town.

Text Format - The most convenient format for text-type material is a WORD type document in RTF file format. Please do not send the material in html form since converting such a document to comply with our Yizkor Book standard template is generally very problematic. If you do not have the MS WORD program, the material can be submitted in simple text form (.txt file type). Note that the text should be in single column form only, as multiple columns cannot be transferred to html.

List Format - There are various types of lists that you might be sending to be added to the project like Table of Contents, List of pictures, List of Martyrs and so on. The most convenient format for our processing or these lists are as a table in WORD - see Word TOC example or in Excel - see Excel TOC example

Fonts - Use a single font type for your material - we request that you use a basic universal font such as “Arial” or “Times New Roman” for the work you present. The use of different font heights, underlining, bolding and italics is fine but sprinkling your work with many and varied font types is not, since they cannot be transferred to the html page and just complicate matters.

Footnotes - In the event that your translation has footnotes, you are requested to place the footnotes at the end of the document as normal text. Likewise, the footnote indicators or pointers should be in normal text - in square brackets to assist in identifying them. We ask you not to use MSWord foot/endnotes because these are very difficult to extract into the html format.

Explanations - In order for the htmler to carry out the work, it is important that the material that you submit be accompanied by some words of explanation. Give a short outline of the file(s) you are sending - a description of the material and the corresponding pages in the original book.

Proof reading - This is the most important point. Making spelling and context changes once the material is in html form is extremely complicated and time-consuming and so we request that you do the following steps before you submit your material.

- Use the built in spelling checker of the WORD and Excel programs to check for spelling errors. This also applies to OCRed material - even the best OCR programs introduce spelling errors into the text.

- Let someone other than the translator review the material to check for grammatical and punctuation errors and missing text. Once again, this should also be done for OCRed material.

We know that it is often impossible to identify all the misspellings and errors before material is submitted to us. However, please be cognizant of the fact that we cannot continually make non-substantive changes in your submission. A substantive change is a serious error in the spelling of a name of a person or town or an error in fact. Requests for minor stylistic changes cannot be honored.

Images - The following is a guide to the scanning and submitting of images for use with the Yizkor Books. We all want to get large highly detailed images to bring our pages to life, this factor must be balanced with files size. People looking at any Web Site will only wait so long for an image to load. When scanning an image for use on a Web page please bear in mind the following:

• Scan at 300 dpi resolution,  at normal size and as color picture (even if it is black and white) - this will enable the HTML team to achieve the optimal quality of the picture displayed. If there are a large number of files and their size is large, we suggest submitting them on a CD and not via email attachments.
• Please make sure the pictures that you scan are aligned correctly. A great deal of definition will be lost in straightening out a crooked picture.
• Save (or export) the file in the format called JPEG. Most scanning software can create files of several different formats, however, please save as JPEG only.
• Please remember when submitting an image for inclusion with a book that you need a relevant name for the image. Yes you could use a, b, c, etc., but over time with the best will in the world people will forget and if your page gets reorganized or updated it can be confusing matching filenames and images. Note also - please do not write captions or notes on the pictures.
• Many images will require a caption. Again, when submitting an image, please clearly identify which caption is for which image if you are submitting many of them. The actual placement of a caption to an image on the web page can be a frightful task at times. Ensuring that it is displayed correctly in all the Internet browsers currently in use is not as straight forward as it may seem. Consequently, it's preferable to place the caption above and below or on either side; “flowing round” is possible but spacing can at times be awkward.