Candice Cloud of Stephen F. Austin State University kindly took the time to answer questions and discuss their projects and experience using the platform with Sara Brumfield of FromThePage.
Candice Cloud is the ETRC Outreach Librarian at the Stephen F. Austin State University Library.
First, tell us about your documents.
The East Texas Research Center (ETRC) collects, preserves and provides access to East Texas’ unique cultural history. The ETRC houses photographs, documents, maps, books and other archival materials that emphasize eastern Texas life, culture, economy and history. The ETRC serves as a Regional Historical Resource Depository for the State of Texas and manages Stephen F. Austin State University’s Record Management Program and the university’s archives.
Currently on FromThePage, our projects include diaries, slave records, and city minutes, most of which are not open to crowdsourced transcriptions. We mainly use FromThePage for student workers and in the classroom.
What are your goals for the projects?
Our main goal with all our projects with FromThePage is to increase access to materials in our digital archive. By transcribing, we can help researchers more efficiently find documents of use through keyword searching, users who are unable to read cursive handwriting can still access the information in the documents, and any user who needs to use a screen reader can also have the same access as any other user.
We do not assign any numerical goals to these collections. We try to transcribe as much as possible within a given amount of time, and we are happy with the number of transcriptions we can get.
How are you recruiting or finding volunteers/collaborators?
All our collaborators fall under two categories: student assistants and volunteers. We have been fortunate to have two grants approved for use of FromThePage, both of which provided enough funding to be able to hire students to transcribe part-time. Our volunteers come to us from the County Courthouse, collaborators being those who need community service hours.
We do have two collections open to the public for crowdsourced transcriptions, but we do not do any recruiting. All users who have worked on these open collections found our documents solely through FromThePage.
Can you share your experience using FromThePage?
During the COVID-19 lockdown, we have our student workers doing transcriptions from home using Google Drive. We were really looking for something easier to access that did not require transcribers to click back and forth between documents and transcriptions. We were in search of a more user-friendly model. For this reason, we began using FromThePage in the Summer of 2022 as a grant-funded project, with student assistants being paid to transcribe our Nacogdoches City Minutes. This made it a lot easier for the students to do the transcriptions because they were able to view the scanned document next to the transcription box. They are also able to manipulate the scanned document to make it more readable by changing the brightness, saturation, etc.
What advice would you give to other institutions thinking about running a similar project?
I would say, “Give it a try!”
Using FromThePage for our transcription projects has only been a positive for our institution. You can change the settings to each collection to make it work best for whatever project type you are working on. Finding out what works best for you is part of the process.
Ready to start a project on FromThePage? Schedule a call with Ben and Sara!