I want to start my Curiosity Curio with a cool project I somehow stumbled on a few years ago. It is a crowdsourcing project run by the Library of Congress (LoC) called By the People. Software engineers- this project is open source, and you’ll find more info on that at the end.
What is the Library of Congress?
One of the first pages in every book includes fun information like who holds the copyright of the book, who is the publisher and who printed and distributed the book. There is usually also either a big block or a few lines about the book’s Library of Congress cataloging.
I think I remember being told in school that every book published in the United States has a copy placed in the Library of Congress, but the Frequently Asked Questions section clarifies that this is not the case.
✨✨✨The more you know…✨✨✨
The Library of Congress is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Per the welcome letter of Carla Hayden, the current Librarian of Congress, it is the largest library in the world, and its collections include “millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts.”
You can visit the Library of Congress and take either a guided or self-guided tour. However, you can’t just wander around the books and check out books like you would at a typical public library. If you want to do research at the Library of Congress I recommend checking out this link.
What about By the People?
The Library of Congress launched the By the People program in 2018, and the name is a phrase from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Tens of thousands of pages of historical documents and papers have been scanned for this program.
By the People uses volunteers to help transcribe these historical documents for digitization to make them more accessible. Creating a user account also allows volunteers to review and add tags to documents.
About the Campaigns
Some of their current campaigns include the writings of Walt Whitman, Hannah Arendt, Clara Barton, and Spanish legal documents from 1300 – 1800. Previous campaigns include documents from the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Federal Theatre Project Playbills, and Letters to Lincoln.
Not all of the documents are in English. Hannah Arendt both wrote in and received correspondence in German. Herencia, which is the Spanish legal documents project, includes documents in Spanish, Catalan, and Latin. Because you are only transcribing what you see written, you do not need to be able to read or understand any foreign languages included in any campaign. It is definitely helpful if you have a background in the language, but it is not a requirement, and you are not translating anything.
That being said, if you are going to transcribe documents in a foreign language, make sure you are typing letters (like the ß) and accents (such as umlauts like ä) correctly. Not using an accent frequently changes the meaning of the word. You may have to do some googling or use the character map in Microsoft to make sure you are using the correct letter.
Also, if you are learning a language, transcribing pages in that language may help keep you motivated in your studies. You also get to see how the language was used in the past in both formal and informal writings.
Want to get started?
Instructions are provided in the How-To tab at the top of the page. You can also find a link to the instructions in Spanish on The Get Started page. I definitely recommend reading through the “How to transcribe” page a couple of times. You may also find it helpful to just leave the tab open until you get the hang of it.
Once you are ready to start transcribing, click on Campaigns. Find one you want to work on, then click on View Projects. Each campaign is organized into multiple projects, such as personal correspondence, business correspondence, diaries, journals, etc.
Click on the project you are interested in, then choose a specific collection to work on. Each project has table that shows you how many registered users have contributed to the project, and a breakdown of the project’s progress.
If you don’t want to put that much thought into which document you transcribe, you can just click on “Jump into a transcription” on the By the People homepage.
You can also look at completed documents. I found this helpful when I was starting out, especially when there was text in the margins, or I wasn’t sure how to transcribe the formatting of a specific document.
From here, you just type what you see! If you have questions, you can click on Discuss and post a question to the discussion board.
This is for you, Software Engineers
Okay, software engineers, now for the info I mentioned earlier. If you go to the FAQ section of the About page, you will find a question about what technology By the People uses. The Library of Congress developed Concordia to meet their needs. There is a link to the Github repository, and where you can review the code and potentially make contributions.
Give it a Try
So, if you are looking for a chill new hobby or want to see and read historical papers you may not have known about otherwise, check out By the People and try transcribing a few pages.
I’ll be back next week with a new Chapters post!
In the meantime, see the Works Cited page for a complete list of sites, images and books referenced in this post.
