Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress: New OCR feature, WWII Rumor Project, & upcoming campaigns

Library of Congress sent this bulletin at 07/25/2023 12:25 PM EDT

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By the People Bulletin

 

Try out "Transcribe with OCR"!

You may have noticed a new feature that can help you with some typed pages. Click the "Transcribe with OCR" button under the image viewer to run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on any page.

OCR software extracts typed text from images and works best on clear, modern typefaces. When the Library of Congress digitizes a large group of printed pages, it will usually OCR them. The materials in By the People campaigns are not good candidates for applying OCR at scale, but OCR can still be a useful starting point for some typed pages, including some printed ephemera, newspapers, book proofs, or dense letterheads.

Using "Transcribe with OCR" will remove anything you have already typed and OCR-generated text always needs to be checked carefully before you submit. When you review, you'll see a notice on any page where a volunteer has used OCR. We've also added a contributor count above the transcription box to let you know how many people have worked on any page!

More info is available in the By the People transcription interface and in this explainer on History Hub. Try out "Transcribe with OCR" and let us know what you think!

Transcriptions for WWII Rumor Project returned to loc.gov 

You can now search and explore page-level transcriptions for the World War II Rumor Project collection on the Library's main website, thanks to By the People volunteers! This unique and fascinating collection contains documentation compiled by the Office of War Information (OWI). 

By the People partnered with colleagues in the American Folklife Center to launch a campaign to transcribe the collection on September 14, 2022 and volunteers completed it in a little over a month, by October 18, 2022. We are grateful to all of the volunteers who transcribed and reviewed these pages to make the World War II Rumor Project collection more accessible for all. 

Upcoming campaigns 

Here's what you can look forward to transcribing in the coming months! 

  • September 2023: Sheet Music of the Musical Theater
  • October 2023: More Theodore Roosevelt!
  • November 2023: Leonard Bernstein correspondence 

 

Warmly,

Abby & the By the People team