Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress: Update for LC staff

Happy Monday, LC transcribers - we've got some exciting updates to share with you! 

Teddy Roosevelt progress

You're all doing an amazing job on the Teddy Roosevelt campaign. So far you've completed 18,241 pages, and 2,103 are in progress or under review, leaving just 37,136 to transcribe! These transcriptions will make a huge difference to researchers, students and other patrons who will be able to word search these documents, and also work with all of the textual data at scale. 

New Campaign: War Diaries of George S. Patton

Although we still have a ways to go on with Teddy Roosevelt, we're mixing it up with a new Campaign - "War Diaries of George S. Patton." This Campaign will appeal to military history buffs in particular, and those who love to decipher challenging handwriting. 

Patton was a soldier and an inveterate war diarist. It is telling that, except for a brief honeymoon diary in 1910 and fox-hunting diaries in the 1930s, he started diaries at the start of a new war, as if that was when he came to life. His diaries cover the Mexican Punitive Expedition of 1916, World War I and World War II. The diaries are riveting and record Patton’s daily activities and observations, likely as a tool to analyze events, unquestionably as an outlet to vent privately. They reveal his candor about himself and his frank and often critical assessments of others. They are also unfiltered. They can be profane, echoing the callousness of war. They also contain observations and perspectives that are sometimes disturbing. Because of potentially offensive language and views, which reflect both their time and circumstances, this transcription project may not suitable for all volunteers. 

Patton Resources & Office Hours

There are additional resources to help you navigate the Patton Campaign, including a guide to link the handwritten documents with their typed, but not always accurate, transcripts made by Patton's wife, Beatrice, and his secretary after his death. By transcribing the original documents as well a the transcripts, we will enable future researchers to compare the two and perhaps gain new insights not only into Patton's life and mind, but the ways in which the people who saved his papers after his death wanted him to be remembered.

For interested staff, we will also be hosting another remote office hour on Monday, May 18th (the latest details can be found in the staff guide here). The BTP team will do a brief transcription refresher and will welcome Meg McAleer, from the Manuscript Division, who will do an overview of Patton and the collection. We hope you can join us!

In solidarity,

The By the People team

Click here for more information.