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 well, and we’re currently hard at work developing a site that will allow the public to help enhance our collections through “crowdsourcing” or collaborative transcription of diaries and other manuscript materials. Stay tuned!
A Look Inside J. Paul Getty’s Newly Digitized Diaries describes J. Paul Getty’s diaries and their contents, and mentions in passing that
We will soon launch a website that will invite your participation to perform the transcriptions (via crowdsourcing), thus rendering the diaries keyword-searchable and dramatically improving their accessibility.
I will be very interested to follow these projects and see which transcription systems they use or develop.