Sitting next to a senior leader of a European library at a IIIF event, he expressed concern that asking volunteers to work on transcribing was taking unfair advantage of free labor. My internal reaction was, “you just want to keep all the good stuff for yourself!” -- but of course I didn’t say that. I talked […]
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Recent Posts from FromThePage
Using FromThePage to Create Descriptive Metadata at Ohio University Libraries
Ohio University Libraries has an internal staff project that uses FromThePage to generate transcriptions and descriptive metadata for a collection of dance posters. This project is a hybrid project, in that transcriptions are generated along with text from the posters captured through standardized metadata fields. These fields allow the posters to be more accessible and […]
The Transcription Quality Balancing Act
We're often asked about the quality of crowdsourced transcription projects by people skeptical that amateurs can edit historic documents. Of course we're confident that amateurs can do high-quality work--especially in active collaboration with professionals--or else we wouldn't be doing this. But many questions remain. What is "quality"? While writing the first draft of the quality […]
An Archivist's Tale Podcast - The Power of These Primary Sources to Bring Meaning
Back in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Ben and Sara Brumfield sat with Karen Trivette and Geof Huth, husband and wife, and partners who run the podcast An Archivist's Tale. In this podcast, Ben and Sara discuss the origin story of FromThePage, their own backgrounds leading up to working in transcription software, motivations for the […]
Resources for Reading Old Handwriting
When it comes to transcription and crowdsourcing, one of the biggest challenges becomes the task of reading and figuring out old handwriting, also known as paleography. But the good news is, this is something that can be improved, and whether you are a project owner or a transcriber, the resources below can help you and […]
More Than Round Trip: Using Transcription for Scholarly Editions and Library Discovery
At the 2021 IIIF Annual Conference, Ben and Sara Brumfield presented "More Than Round Trip: Using Transcription for Scholarly Editions and Library Discovery." In this presentation, linked as a video below and embedded as slides, they talked about the challenges of bringing crowdsourced metadata and transcription back into multi-party library systems, and how FromThePage can […]