The
Smithsonian always has a place in my heart and I’ve written about it a few
times before (see note at end).
It is also an institution that has
been working diligently to take advantage of crowdsourcing to make part of its
massive holdings available to us. I’ve
previously talked about this, Smithsonian + Crowdsourcing
Digitization = Lots of really neat stuff available to us!.
It seems that it’s time for an
update since The Wall Street Journal published a post, The Smithsonian Works to Digitize
Millions of Documents.
In an epic effort to turn the reams of archival material at Washington's Smithsonian Institution into digitally searchable files, museum officials have turned to the crowd: They've created a new Transcription Center that allows any interested person to sift through scanned, handwritten documents and submit their own transcriptions online. On the center's site, which officially launched last month, people ... can click on a photocopy of a document, zoom
in, decipher its sentences and send in their typed transcription with a click.
The article also mentions some other
crowdsourcing projects for The New York Public Library and the University of Iowa Libraries
Back to the Smithsonian -- when you
visit The
Transcription Center, you can browse on projects by Museums
and Archives or Themes, read about “how to transcribe” (which also includes how
to review). Don’t want to transcribe, then someone to review what others
transcribed is always needed!
I personally find that transcribing
documents can be very challenging between issues of handwriting, unfamiliar
terminology, unusual names, and the many other challenges to deciphering what
has been written by others. That said,
there is nothing more satisfying than putting in the effort to be so challenged
and create something that just might make a future researcher’s search that
much easier.
It’s really quite simple -- select a project, click on the Start Transcribing (or Start Reviewing), Read the Tutorial for the project (or if you are familiar with the project you can select “I’ve already read through it and I’m sure I know what I’m doing.”) and then you will see a page like this and you are off and running to start transcribing (in the right hand box) what you see in the image to see to the left.
Even if you can only decipher a word
or two or a phrase or two – it doesn’t matter! Every single word that is
transcribed is one less word for someone else to have to worry about.
With so much material that won’t be transcribed and searchable in our lifetime, nothing says we cannot at least try to get a whole bunch of it done so we can use it
Have you
participated in a crowdsourcing project tied to genealogy or family history? What
did you think?
Are there
other genealogical or historically-themed crowdsourcing efforts (besides those
listed below) which family historians might want to participate in?
Editor’s Note: Other articles on Upfront with NGS about the Smithsonian
...
+ Past Imperfect -- Smithsonian Blog with the tagline, History with all
the interesting bits left in
Editor’s Note: Other articles on Upfront with NGS about Crowdsourcing
...
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