Library of Congress - Crowd (crowdsourcing transcriptions)

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The Library of Congress has a beta crowdsourcing project happening - anyone can "[v]olunteer to uncover our shared history and make documents more searchable for everyone."

Currently, volunteers can help transcribe (digitize) five different campaigns: Branch Rickey: Changing the Game, Civil War Soldiers: Disabled But Not Disheartened, Clara Barton: Angel of the Battlefield, Letters to Lincoln, and Mary Church Terrell: Advocate for African Americans and Women. When you select a campaign, you will be able to see how much of the campaign is complete, how much is in progress, and the number of people contributing-

If you click into a campaign's items, you will see the individual pages along with a notation underneath it telling if it is complete, awaiting review, or still needs to be transcribed -

If you select a document/page, you see the scanned document on the left, and a window on the right where you can transcribe the writing on the page -
After seeing this, I was thinking about how it could be used with students. There is, of course, the tie-in with primary documents.  Also, students could gain understanding of the labor that goes into making documents accessible in a digital manner that is searchable.  And, if nothing else, they can gain an appreciation for the struggles of teachers that have to decipher handwriting that is not always legible :-)

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