Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress The Latest

Happy first birthday to By the People!

October 24th marks one whole year of the Library of Congress crowdsourcing program By the People! In just 12 months, the project has added a total of 11 campaigns for virtual volunteers anywhere in the world to transcribe, review, and tag, including Clara Barton’s diaries, drafts of Walt Whitman's poetry, and the fieldwork papers of ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax! Over 11,000 volunteers have registered and even more have contributed anonymously.

Together volunteers have completed over 31,000 pages and another 55,000 await peer review. Remember, review is a vital step to getting transcriptions published back on the Library's main website. Read more about year 1 accomplishments in this blog post.

We are so grateful to each and every person who has contributed to this project. Even if you only transcribe one sentence or one page, you're bringing us nearer to our goal of making Library of Congress materials word-searchable and discoverable. We hope that you're also having fun and satisfying your curiosity by delving into these historic collections. And don't worry, to keep pace with your amazing energies, we'll keep adding more materials! 

World Series celebrations and a new By the People publication

As you may remember, volunteers completed the Branch Rickey baseball scouting reports in just under four months between the launch of By the People in October 2018, and February 2019. We then published these completed transcriptions back on loc.gov and wrote a blog post about the data and its potential for research. Explore it for yourself! 

We also shared news of the project and the Branch Rickey data in the September-October issue of Archival Outlook. We hope the article will appeal to archivists as well as people outside of the archival profession. What better way to enhance the World Series than by reading about a bit of baseball history, and your place in it? 

Thanks for all you do!

Victoria and the By the People team

Click here for more information.