by Sara Ring
Quick Summary
The Library of Congress recently launched a new crowdsourcing platform, crowd.loc.gov. The platform will improve discovery and access to LC's digital collections, with help from volunteers. The most recent project, Letters to Lincoln Challenge, challenged volunteers to transcribe 28,000 digitized pages written by or to Abraham Lincoln by the end of 2018. Transcribing the handwritten letters makes the text machine readable and searchable to historians and other researchers.
The Library of Congress recently launched a new crowdsourcing platform, crowd.loc.gov. The platform will improve discovery and access to LC's digital collections, with help from volunteers. The most recent project, Letters to Lincoln Challenge, challenged volunteers to transcribe 28,000 digitized pages written by or to Abraham Lincoln by the end of 2018. Transcribing the handwritten letters makes the text machine readable and searchable to historians and other researchers. At the time this article was published, 9,621 letters were started. The new challenge is to finish by LIncoln's birthday on February 12, 2019.
This project is one example of the LIbrary of Congress's new Digital Strategy, as they think more about how LC can become more user centered, bridge geographical dividies, expand their reach, and enhance their services. The crowdsourcing platform runs on Concordia, open source software developed by the Library of Congress. The code is free to reuse and available through their Github repository.
