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Hi Eric, Both From the Page and DIY History are great resources for crowdsourcing transcriptions, yes, and Ben Brumfield is a great help and a great guy. There are also plugins for crowdsourcing transcriptions: Scripto (available at http://scripto.org) is a free open source plugin based on MediaWiki that has versions for many common CMSes. That being said, Scripto can be a bit technically difficult to set up (and does require a MediaWiki installation) and a bit hard to use. Still: free! Open source! A group I was working with at Virginia Tech is developing a new crowdsourcing plugin for Omeka called "Incite": they use it on the "Mapping the Fourth of July" project at http://incite.cs.vt.edu/m4j/incite/. It hasn't been released to the community yet, and it's still lacking some features (notably, a way for others to review and revise transcriptions), but if you're interested in trying it you could contact Kurt Luther at Virginia Tech. I will say that it's usually not so simple as putting up the documents and letting people transcribe them: there's a fair amount of publicity and community management that has to happen before things get transcribed. Two really effective strategies in the absence of a dedicated transcription community manager are 1) to hold "transcribathon" events, and 2) to partner with teachers who'll ask their students to do transcriptions as class exercises. Transcribing documents is always a fantastic thing for students to do: it sparks their interest and gets them to really engage with primary sources in a way they rarely get to do. Cheers, and good luck! Amanda Amanda French Website: http://amandafrench.net Twitter: @amandafrench Skype: amandafrenchphd Cell: 720-530-7515 On 5/25/17 11:00 PM, CODE4LIB automatic digest system wrote: > ------------------------------ > > Date: Thu, 25 May 2017 16:21:58 -0400 > From: Eric Lease Morgan<[log in to unmask]> > Subject: crowdsourcing transcriptions > > Does anybody here have knowledge or experience regarding crowdsourcing transcription services? > > Some of my day-to-day work revolves around a thing affectionately called the Catholic Portal. [1] The Portal is an alliance of members who provide access to rare an infrequently held materials of a Catholic nature. Many of our member organizations are tiny, really tiny, and consequently they do not have very many fiscal resources. On the other hand, they are very rich is primary source materials. As these materials get digitized, there is a need/desire to transcribe them. (OCR will not be an option.) > > I was wondering, do any of you know of any services supporting the crowdsources of transcriptions, or maybe there is a piece of (open source) software allowing me to publicize things to transcribed, and then allowing somebody to actually do the work? > > [1] Portal -http://catholicresearch.net > > — > Eric Morgan