People often worry about the quality of crowdsourced transcriptions – and we get it. Strangers, from the internet, working on your material? Yikes! But here’s the deal: many of them won’t be strangers long. The intrinsic motivation our volunteers have and their understanding of how important your material is to historians and genealogists, makes them take a lot of care – more, I’d argue, than an offshore transcriber you might pay for the same work.
That being said, we have a lot of features in FromThePage to make reviewing crowdsourcing projects easier. The “Review” tab – visible to anyone authorized to review – is the shortcut to most of them. (Who is “authorized to review”? That depends on your settings. It can range from anyone, to just staff on the project, to staff and designated reviews.)
First, we recommend you look at these 3 lists:
The first two are pages saved by folks you haven’t seen before. The volunteers in the first list are new to your project, and have saved more than one page. Review their work, and then send them a welcome email and, if needed, some gentle corrections and a link to your help documentation.
The second, “One-off Contributions”, are what we think of as “drive-by transcribers.” They drop in, transcribe a single page, and you never see them again. (If they do, they move to the first list.) These are your “most likely to need revision” pages. (You could also ask one of your super transcribers to review and finish these.)
The third section, “Works to Review” takes you to a list of all the documents in this collection with information about each one useful for review purposes. You can sort the first 6 columns to make it easy to pinpoint documents to work on.
- Which document has the most notes on pages?
- Which document has been worked on by a known transcriber, so might be easy to review?
- Which document has the fewest number of pages to review? (Let’s feel accomplished!)
- Which document has the most pages that have been worked on, but not marked “done” (“incomplete” pages)?
Clicking on the work title in this list drops you into the “pages to review” for that document.
This is just one of about 3 ways we have to get the most out of your reviewing time. More in next month's newsletter!