The Library of Congress can be a great place to find everything from free movies and books to epic public-domain pictures of cats.
One key step in getting all that great content online: it needs to be digitized. When it comes to things like old letters and writings, that means that it also needs to be digitized by hand.
The Library of Congress launched By the People in 2018 to allow you the general public to help with some of that transcribing. You don’t get paid in cash, but it does afford you the opportunity to see a number of historical documents that you might not otherwise be able to.
The transcriptions will help improve search, so people can find the documents easier in the future. IT will also help make those documents accessible to people who are not fully sighted or those that might have trouble reading the original handwriting in the document (raises hand).
And there’s some pretty awesome stuff available to transcribe. Right now, for instance, the site is asking for help in transcribing documents from the women’s suffrage movement, and old poetry and writings from Walt Whitman.
To transcribe you can just visit the site, pick something you want to work on, and go. If you sign up for an account, you can also access additional features such as tagging and the ability to review other people’s transcriptions. Yes, transcriptions are reviewed for accuracy before they’re uploaded to the Library of Congress.
If you’re looking to kill a little time, it can be a fun way to take a look at the past while helping people locate the same documents in the future.