The last few weeks have seen the announcement of two new transcription projects. I'm particularly excited about them because--like FromThePage--their manuscripts are diaries and they plan to open the transcription tasks to the public. Dear Diary announces the digitization of University of Iowa's Historic Iowa Children's Diaries: We have a deep love for historic diaries as … [Read more...] about Two New Diary Transcription Projects
NABPP Transcription User Survey Results
The ever-innovative North American Bird Phenology Program has just released the results of their user satisfaction survey. In addition to offering kudos to the NABPP for pleasing its users--who had transcribed 346,786 species observation cards as of November--I'd like to highlight some of the survey results -- after all, this is the first user survey for a transcription tool … [Read more...] about NABPP Transcription User Survey Results
Militieregisters.nl and Velehanden.nl
Militieregisters.nl is a new transcription project organized by the City Archive Amsterdam that plans to use crowdsourcing to index militia registers from several Dutch archives. It's quite ambitious, and there are a number of innovative features about the project I'd like to address. However, I haven't seen any English-language coverage of the project so I'll try to … [Read more...] about Militieregisters.nl and Velehanden.nl
Errata
Two important errata in previous posts are worth highlighting: Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription Commenters on my most recent post, "Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription" have pointed out that the Wikisource rule prohibiting the addition of unpublished works--thereby almost entirely prohibiting manuscript transcription projects--is specific to the language domains. … [Read more...] about Errata
Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription
Of the crowdsourcing projects that have real users doing manuscript transcription, one of the largest is an offshoot of Wikisource. ProofreadPage was an extension to MediaWiki created around 2006 on the French-language Wikisource as a Wikisource/Internet Archive replacement for Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. They were taking DjVu files from the InternetArchive … [Read more...] about Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription