Digital Knowledge: Library of Congress By the People Campaign

For this assignment, I contributed to a Library of Congress crowdsourcing campaign called By the People (https://crowd.loc.gov/get-started/), which solicits transcription of historical documents.  I transcribed a piece of sheet music that can be found at the breadcrumb trail Home/Sheet Music of the Musical Theater/1860 to 1879/Only a dream/2016764715-1.

It was unclear to me how the LOC was actively working to engage potential transcribers and reviewers, as I had to perform a targeted search on the website to find information about the campaign.  By the People is currently not featured on the LOC homepage, though it is listed on the Discover page.  I would expect that the campaign would elicit more participation if information about it was placed more prominently on the homepage (which may very well have been done when the campaign first launched).  I would expect even greater exposure and participation if the campaign was publicized on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.  This would be even more effective if periodic updates were posted and featured transcriptions highlighted. 

The banner for the campaign currently reads, “Welcome to By the People! Help us transcribe Library of Congress documents. Volunteer-created transcriptions will be published on loc.gov to improve search, access, and discovery of these pages from history.”  An even more inspirational description could emphasize that volunteers are actively bringing history to life for readers and researchers around the world, perhaps noting that by transcribing an historical document they may be the very first person to connect with that piece of history.

The transcription I made was short compared to other documents I browsed, but even this short musical piece underscored some challenges in the transcription process.  Firstly, at the top of the piece was a small note handwritten in pencil that I was unsure whether needed to be included.  Much of it was illegible and the music transcription instructions did not offer any guidance on handling handwritten notes, so I made a judgement call to exclude it from the transcription.  Secondly, I was uncertain of how to handle capitalization, and again, the instructions did not include guidance in this area.  Some of the heading matter of the piece is shown in all capitals, and within the lyrics there are two mid-sentence breaks with random capitalization in the middle.  I opted to use traditional capitalization in the transcript.    

The LOC mitigated risk of inaccurate transcription by instituting a second person reviewer for every transcription prior to publication.  Transcribers are not required to create an account and log in – transcriptions can be done anonymously – but reviewers must log in for accountability. There were no terms of service associated with transcribing or creating an account, but there are multiple instruction sets for transcribing and reviewing.

Generally speaking, crowdsourcing content provides LAM institutions with a vast expansion of content opportunities, but at the cost of consistency and control over that content.  As illustrated in this LOC campaign, crowdsourcing provides free menial labor to perform tasks that would be cost- and time-prohibitive without volunteers.  Most likely, the documents that are part of the By the People campaign would never be transcribed by LAM professionals.  However, by inviting volunteers to perform the work, the LOC introduced a degree of uncertainty in the accuracy of the transcriptions as well as potential inconsistencies in how the transcriptions are performed – particularly with respect to documents that require the transcriber to make judgement calls (i.e., illegible handwriting, atypical punctuation or document structure, handwritten markings added after the original document was created, etc).  But the benefits of opening access to a vastly larger pool of resources far outweigh the risks, particularly when measures are put into place to maintain the integrity of the crowdsourced contributions.