Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress: New Historical Legal Reports, Whitman wrap-up, & Herencia spotlight

Library of Congress sent this bulletin at 07/06/2023 04:15 PM EDT

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New Historical Legal Reports launched

Calling all students of history, government, law, public policy, international relations, and other interested members of the public – help us expand access to previously unreleased legal reports and other publications from the Law Library of Congress dating back to the 1940s! Volunteer transcriptions from the first part of this campaign already help people find and use the collection on loc.gov. This week we've added a new batch for transcription.

The reports in this phase mostly reflect legal research and analysis from the mid-twentieth century and are often the only known copies. You'll notice that all of these reports are typed on thin, paper with marginal print quality. This makes it difficult for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs to identify text and therefore, makes them excellent candidates for transcription.

Whitman month wrap-up

In June, volunteers focused their attention on the Walt Whitman campaign, completing over 1,500 pages and saving over 11,700 transcriptions! Thank you to everyone who participated. You've helped us move this campaign closer to completion. There is still a lot of transcribing and reviewing to do in the Whitman campaign so keep up the good work.

Campaign spotlight - Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents

Do you have Spanish or Latin skills? Help us transcribe colonial Spanish legal documents from the 15th to 19th centuries. The majority of these materials were printed using handset type on handmade paper, though there are also handwritten manuscripts and printed texts with handwritten notes. These pages provide a fascinating look at many different facets of Spain and its colonial empire including decrees and laws issued by kings and the Catholic Church, judicial decisions in cases relating to trade, family issues, crime, and many other types of legal documents.

All the best,

Abby & the By the People team