Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress: New volunteer profile tools & new datasets!

By the People Bulletin

New tools available to document volunteer hours 

Are you a By the People volunteer who documents service hours for your school or organization? We've made several updates to our service documentation tools that may help. On the profile page, you'll now be able to download your recent activity alongside the service letter. This feature is located at the bottom of the "My Contributions" tab. We also added a spreadsheet template to help make calculating and tracking your volunteer hours a little easier. You'll find that right below the service letter download. Don't have a user account and want to access these new tools? Register for one today! 

These new tools come in advance of a change in our volunteer hours policy. Starting in 2024, community managers will no longer sign off on organizational forms (including automated ones) or provide customized letters. Our site doesn't track the amount of time you spend volunteering, so our team is unable to verify your hours beyond the documentation methods described above. Please reach out to us if you have any questions about this change coming next year.  

Three new transcription datasets

By the People recently released three new full-text transcription datasets for the National American Woman Suffrage Association collection, a petition containing the names of thousands of Black South Carolinians, and Historical Legal Reports from the Law Library. These sets contain a README file which provides background information on the material, how the transcriptions were created, what each spreadsheet column includes, and a spreadsheet comprising all of the transcriptions of the campaign in individual rows. These datasets present endless possibilities for exploration-from facilitating easier search, to making connections between historical figures, to mapping geographical locations, and more! What will you do with the data? 

Ask By the People! 

You might have noticed that our Contact Form changed recently. By the People now uses Ask-a-Librarian, which enables us to serve a wider audience and direct questions more easily to curators when you ask about Library of Congress collections. Your questions or comments still get right to the By the People community managers and we look forward to hearing from you!

 

Happy Thanksgiving week,

Abby & the By the People team