Crowdsourcing Civil War Document Transcription

Last fall the Library of Congress launched a new online initiative called Crowd. As the name implies, it's a crowdsourcing project that anyone who registers on the LOC Crowd site can participate in. All of the documents in the Crowd project are documents in the LOC's collection that need to be transcribed.

The latest collection of documents added to the Crowd project is a set of roughly 35,000 documents related to the American Civil War. Anyone can participate in this project. To get started simply go to the site and select a document within the Civil War collection. Your chosen document will appear on the left side of the screen and a field for writing your transcription appears on the right side of the screen. After you have completed your transcription it is submitted for peer review.

Watch the video that I made last fall to see how the LOC Crowd project works and how your students can participate in it.



Applications for Education
Participating in the LOC's Crowd project could be a good opportunity for high school students and some middle school students to learn through primary source documents while contributing to a national project.

As is show in the video above, The Smithsonian has a similar crowdsourcing project called Smithsonian Digital Volunteers.