stumpers Mailing List: Join us for "By the People" -- An Overview of Library of Congress' crowd-sourced transcription program

[John Burger (jburger]

ASERL Friends:

We are pleased to offer this new webinar from our colleagues at the Library of 
Congress.  "By the People" is a web-based crowdsourcing project and program of 
engagement launched by the Library of Congress in October 2018. It is built on 
Concordia, new software for crowdsourced text transcription and tagging, which 
was developed at the Library in 2018. By the People invites volunteers all over 
the world to transcribe and tag digitized images of documents in the Library’s 
collections. 

As of December 2019, By the People offers twelve collections for volunteers to 
engage with and explore, including the papers of Abraham Lincoln, American Red 
Cross founder Clara Barton, Suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Mary Church 
Terrell, Civil War soldiers, and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. The goals of the 
project are to engage people with Library collections and increase access to 
these collections by making them word searchable and legible to screen readers. 
By the People provides new opportunities for learning and personal growth for 
people across the age and educational spectrum, and is frequently used by 
educators and librarians for teaching and programming in their own 
institutions. 

Anyone can take part in By the People: you don’t even need an account to 
transcribe. Volunteers who register for an account can also add tags and review 
transcriptions created by other volunteers. All transcriptions are created and 
reviewed by volunteers before they are returned to the Library’s main website, 
loc.gov, where they are published alongside the original images with an 
attribution to the volunteers. The data are also available in bulk to support 
research in disciplines ranging from Machine Learning, linguistics, literature, 
languages, and history, to name a few. 

This webinar will provide an overview of how By the People works, how 
crowdsourcing projects and programs might be adopted at other institutions, and 
how the resulting data can serve researchers and patrons.

WEBINAR:  "By the People" -- An Overview of Library of Congress' crowd-sourced 
transcription program 
DATE & TIME:  Jan 16, 2020 at 2pm ET / 1pm central Time 
REGISTER:  https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2425967254767661835 

ASERL webinars are licensed under a Creative Commons 
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  As always, 
these sessions are available at no cost, and will be recorded for later 
playback on our Archive page -- see http://www.aserl.org/archive .   

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information 
about joining the webinar.
https://link.gotowebinar.com/help-system-requirements-attendees  




--jeb

John Burger, Executive Director
Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL)
c/o Robert W. Woodruff Library
540 Asbury Circle, Suite 316
Atlanta, GA  30322

404-727-0137