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Using Crowdsourced Indexes in Preservica

January 18, 2023 by FromThePage

What can you do with transcripts once your project is done? The Texas Digital Archive transcribed the handwritten index to a 3rd court of appeals and turned it into a look up table by Appellant and Appellee, making their digitized case records much more accessible.

Texas Digital Archive records

The Texas Commission on Libraries and Archives transcribed a handwritten index to their Court of Appeals records.  This isn't the same kind of record as a diary or a letter--it's not really useful to transcribe this as if it were prose -- you need to encode the appellant, appellee, book and page numbers as strucured data.

The staff configured the project for spreadsheet transcription, and had users encode the contents as if they were typing in Excel.

Spreadsheet transcription

The results were exported from FromThePage as a CSV file, and handed to Brian Thomas to update the record in Preservica.

Spreadsheet content

But here's the problem: what metadata field does the contents of a spreadsheet go into?

Brian is an absolute wizard, so despite the limitations of Preservica, he was able to clean up the record and attach it to be downloaded by researchers.  

Texas Digital Archive Indexes and Registers

Even better, he was able create an interactive lookup table as a finding aid, feeding the CSV file to a javascript library and webpage embedded within Preservica. Pretty cool, right?

Texas 3rd Court of Appeals Index look-up table

You can view the 3rd Court of Appeals Index here.

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