Library of Congress by the People (https://crowd.loc.gov/) was launched in 2018 during the autumn season when the first transcribe-a-thon took place at the Library of Congress. This was also on the 155^th anniversary of the famous Gettysburg Address orated by Abraham Lincoln. This organization also offers a free “How to Host a Transcribe-a-thon” PDF.

USA

There are a few different opportunities for online volunteers. You can transcribe documents, meaning that you just need to type out exactly what you see on the page. You can also opt for tagging documents, meaning that you add keywords to help people have an easier time seeing what you find. Another opportunity is to review the transcribed documents to fix any errors that may exist on them as well as to complete the transcriptions.

The benefit of volunteering here is that you get to be a part of making these historic documents more accessible to anyone who wants to read them. This is especially true for those documents that are handwritten, which people may have difficulty reading.

There is no required time commitment for this organization.

The Library of Congress by the People is funded by the National Digital Library Trust and is the result of the collaboration with the teams and divisions at the Library of Congress. By the People runs off of the platform Concordia, which is an open source software that was developed to crowdsource these transcription projects by the Library of Congress.

To learn more about this opportunity, you can visit this page: https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns-topics/.