>> Good afternoon.
My name is Cathy McGuigan from the Library
of Congress and I would like to welcome you
to our Online Office Hours
from the Library of Congress.
Our focus today is on crowdsourcing
at the Library of Congress
and we're glad you can join us, or
if you're joining us by recording.
So these informal sessions are short.
There will be a 20-minute
demonstration or discussion,
and the sessions are being
recorded, as I mentioned before.
You will have the opportunity to talk to
each other and the presenter via chat.
So let's get started with using chat.
Tell us your name, where you're joining
us from, and what and whom you teach.
So mentioned earlier, today's episode is on
crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress.
Today you'll hear about virtual volunteering
and learning opportunities for students
through the Library's By the People
crowdsourcing project which is available
at crowds dot -- crowd --
sorry, singular -- .loc.gov.
Our speakers will demonstrate site
functionality and focus on how it can be used
in the classrooms, either virtual or in
person, and to build students' confidence
with reading handwriting, parsing primary
sources, and analyzing historical context.
Today's guide is Victoria Van Hyning,
a Senior Innovation Specialist
in the Digital Services Directorate.
And her backup today is Carlyn Osborn,
a Digital Collection Specialist,
also from the Digital Services Directorate.
Sorry, that's hard to get out.
Joining us on chat are two of my
colleagues, Cheryl Lederle and Danna Bell,
and they'll be able to assist with
any questions you might throw our way.
And so we look forward to a great program.
Victoria, the microphone is yours.
>> Okay, everybody.
I hope you can hear me well wherever you are.
Thank you, [inaudible], for having us today.
We love to have the opportunity to share with
a lot of people, particularly with educators.
You're some of our best advocates and we love
to work with you and work with your students.
And, it was already mentioned,
and is in the chat,
and it's on the starting slide,
our URL is crowd.loc.gov.
So we launched about 16-17 months ago
in 2018, and we set out with the goals
of making documents like this one that
you see here, which is a pancake recipe
from the Rosa Parks' papers, discoverable
both for researchers, patrons, students,
and everybody who uses the loc.gov website,
but also for those who are using screen readers
because they have low to no vision.
And so when they encounter a page like
this one or if you were conducting a search
for a document that hasn't been
transcribed like this lovely pancake recipe,
you're not going to find it because the
image itself is not yet legible to computers.
So the transcriptions will
open these documents up
and that's what we're doing
over on By the People.
We're transcribing documents.
Every document is reviewed by another volunteer.
And then we bring it back to
the Library's main website.
So this is something that students can do
and anybody anywhere who's
got an internet connection.
You don't need to even be logged in, although if
you are logged in, you'll be able to also review
and ad text and we'll show a little
bit more about what all that means.
I've just seen a message pop up so I'm
going to double check that my sound is okay.
All right.
[Inaudible].
Yeah. So we're making documents
keyword searchable.
We're helping those with visual impairments
who use accessibility technologies.
And we're also making the text available for
computational analysis so that means not just
that we're aiding the individual search down to
the page level, but we're also releasing batches
of text so maybe, you know, tens of thousands,
or eventually hundreds of thousands of documents
from the [inaudible], or
from presidential papers,
or the papers of Rosa Parks,
and other individuals.
And that will help certain types of researchers
such as linguists seek patterns in the data
which they can't really do without
the transcriptions [inaudible].
Then we give you an example
of searching on loc.gov.
Hoping that all of you have seen a page
that looks like this at some point,
or that you're inspired today
to go and have a look
through some of these different collections.
So every collection pretty much on the
Library's website has an about kind
of landing page right here,
"About this Collection".
And also let's [inaudible] collection
items, additional articles and essays.
Those of you familiar with the awesome
[inaudible] curated websites will have explored
some of these types of pages before.
So what does the new text let us do?
Well, for example, in this document
it's going to let us search right
down to this example of the word "tornado".
This is in a letter that was transcribed by
our volunteers fairly early on the project.
It's from a frontiersman who's in Illinois
and he's writing to his brother back
on the East Coast saying,
"Hey, come out and join us.
It's a great life except for a
lot of people are sick and dying
and there are tornadoes and wild boars.
But other than that, it's great.
And, by the way, there's this great boat
master named Lincoln and he let's us,
you know, grab our mail when he's out.
He just leaves the door open".
So this is an example of the search.
It's an example of maybe making a document
that's not super visually accessible to people
who haven't done cursive yet,
accessible in multiple ways.
You can give it a [inaudible] and
then also start to train your eye.
This is really good for students using the text
side-by-side to see what is the transcription
and then map onto the funny looking shapes and
letters to the right in this kind of image.
Another important thing is that we give
credit to our volunteers not on an individual
by individual basis because we allow
anonymous participation, but in aggregate.
So we're showing in every page and every
downloadable transcript that it's transcribed
and reviewed by volunteer participating
in the By the People project.
And your students should know and you should
know that this is a really tangible outcome
where we're making your work
accessible and useful fairly quickly.
So far we've returned about 17,000
pages to the Library's website
of the 100,000 plus that have been transcribed.
And there's a discrepancy in the numbers
because we only take back whole items,
like a whole journal or a whole letter.
So the whole thing is transcribed we
won't bring back other sort of loose pages
or out of [inaudible] will
have to wait until it's done.
So you and your students will need an internet
connection, preferably something fairly robust
because this is going to be an
image-based transcription project
so dial-up might [inaudible], a modern browser,
so not Internet Explorer
but Chrome, Firefox, Safari.
And a keyboard is recommended although
you can definitely do this on iPad
and even a phone [inaudible], although that
might be a bit of a strain for [inaudible].
And then can then skip over
now to our website itself
and hopefully we will be
able to see it no problem.
Okay. Looks like I'm sharing
Chrome so I hope we're good to go.
Then this is the main page for By the People.
You can scroll down and see that
we're featuring some collections.
So this is our newest one, The
Blackwells, an Extraordinary Family.
They were lifelong suffragist,
abolitionists, educators.
Some of the women in the family were the
earliest in America to earn medical degrees.
And they were also all fairly
eloquent and wrote a lot of stuff
so that's why we're featuring them.
We have a lot of their materials to work with.
We also have, for any of you who
is teaching Spanish or Latin,
Herencia is the Spanish legal documents
collection which might be of interest.
I'm happy to answer some
more questions about that.
And we also have this Browse
All Campaigns [inaudible],
and similarly we can get the fullest
of things that are available on here.
So I've already opened that
tab to save us a little time.
And I'm going to briefly scroll through here.
In the suffrage area we've actually
grouped a bunch of materials.
We have our Blackwells, but also other readers,
the [inaudible], and Carrie Chapman Catt,
Anna Dickinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Mary Church Terrell, Susan B. Anthony.
For all of you literature fans we
have some Whitman material as well,
and papers of Clara Barton, Red Cross founder.
When a collection is all done,
we leave it up on the site.
If you want to explore it, this
[inaudible] a great way for students
to perhaps train their eyes so they'll see
documents that have been marked as complete
which means a volunteer has then reviewed
another volunteer volunteer's transcription,
and then accepted it as all done.
And we have Civil War materials, papers
of Rosa Parks which I mentioned earlier,
pancake recipe which is now all transcribed
and ready to come back to loc.gov,
and some of their papers down
here, a history of baseball
and additional war materials
from a Union [inaudible].
Those are the offerings.
This is an example of what
happens when you click
through into a specific campaign,
as we call them.
This is The Blackwells so your students
or you will gain historical background.
We have a lot of the links back to the
Library of Congress and things like a timeline
which can be really helpful for
[inaudible] gaining the context
of when a document was written and what were the
important things that were going on at the time.
Again, our [inaudible] colleagues that
curated really excellent additional timelines,
and materials, blogs, and essays within a lot
of the historical periods that are covered here.
So I'm hoping that they're listing in the chat
about wonderful follow-up places or we can talk
about that in the Q and A. The Library of
Congress has two exhibitions on right now which,
of course, are closed to the public, but you can
still look through a lot of the content online.
So we've got a Library of Congress
Suffrage Exhibition on here.
And if you go into the Rosa Parks
papers, you can also find a link
to that extraordinary exhibition there as well.
Once you click down, well,
I'll give an example now,
you start getting into sort
of different types of content.
So I've clicked into some correspondence,
family correspondence between members
of the family or from them to other people.
And we see these helpful little filter button.
You can click [inaudible] box over here.
Or you can click in this list here.
So a great place to start with your
students I would say is looking
for things that need to be reviewed.
It doesn't present them with a blank page and
just say, you know, "Get going and do it".
It maybe present them with something that's
been fully transcribed but there are a couple
of little edits that need to made, and
sometimes a page isn't in great shape
and there will be a lot of question marks and,
you know, uncertainties which they might be able
to like fill in or if they may not and they
may want to go on to the different document.
In progress is another potential place to
start, again, somebody may have taken a crack
at a page, they didn't finish
it, there's more to do.
The students can start to like get their
eyes comfortable with what's happening.
Or if they want to start their own adventure
totally legit, they can go to Not Started
and then they'll see the documents
that have Not Started pages available.
It's not as you see the different colors here,
the different shades of blue and the sort
of grayish-whitish color are indicating
that these documents have a mix of pages
in different stages of some not started,
some waiting for review, some in progress,
and indeed some that are completed which
maybe is also a good place to start, you know,
read some stuff that's considered totally done
to get familiar with somebody's handwriting,
and with cursive I think that's
a really helpful thing to do.
The further we go back in time, typically
the more challenging the cursive is,
the more ornate it is.
It's not always true, but it is often true.
So, you know, maybe starting in the
twentieth century is not a bad idea.
But Alice Stone Blackwell is
the daughter of Lucy Blackwell.
She is a younger generation
in the suffrage movement
and her handwriting may be a little
bit less challenging than her mom's.
You know, those are some
helpful clues to look out for.
So I've pulled up a specific page from a
diary in Alice Stone Blackwell's papers.
And just to give you a sense, you
know, they are copies from microfilm.
So they are black and white and they
can be a little challenging sometimes
but often they're very clear.
But as you see these, you'll
have some abbreviation,
I'm assuming what that is as I'm skimming.
And you might also [inaudible]
some words that really jump
out at you and jump out at your students.
Shakespeare Club, ooh, that's a good one.
Women's Literary Club, ooh,
another good one, you know.
So this is the kind of handwriting that
I think might be a nice place to start.
And then, you know, here's an example of a
letter that can be a little challenging maybe
if you're just starting out
on your cursive journey.
This looks like it could be
books, magazines, and papers.
And so working with students, you know,
look out for those perhaps challenging,
unusual letters to our eyes now that start
kind of building your visual vocabulary.
And another thing about all of this
is that if you click on this button,
they will take you back to this page,
this item on the Library's website.
There may be additional information there.
[Inaudible] discussion on that again.
We'll check that I'm [inaudible]
and I'm seeing some great questions.
Okay. I'm assuming we'll
save questions for later on.
But I'll just quickly say we
have quick tips down here for how
to help people capture certain
types of information.
So the asset everybody transcribe original
spelling, punctuation, and word order but that
if there's something that's really
illegible, or it's been [inaudible],
you can surround it in square brackets.
If there's something that you just
cannot identify but you can make out most
of the word [inaudible] and question mark is
great and then hopefully the reviewer will look
at it and say, "Oh, I can
read that," or say, "No,
that's really not legible," and just leave it.
And we're trying to really
minimize the burden of markup.
So we don't want people to spend, you know,
as much time adding kind of additional markup
and transcribing are really
interested in what does this text say.
So we don't have people adding like any
[inaudible] that has been italicized.
It's [inaudible] above the line.
We are saying basically it's got quite a
lightweight set of instructions and [inaudible]
if you see something inserted over the line,
bring it down to have it as [inaudible].
And you can always go look in the Help Center
at any time and I'll click through to that.
We've got a pretty robust FAQ and
detailed instructions about how
to transcribe, how to review, how to tag.
I'm not going to talk about
tagging in very much detail.
I'll just give you two pointers,
or three pointers.
One from a teaching perspective, FAQ can be
a nice, gentle entry point into a document
in terms of a primary source
analysis kind of activity.
And they're asking students to add local
information that's not derived directly
on the text or directly from
the resource description.
So like if it's a diary written by Alice Stone
Blackwell, a tag saying that it's a diary
that was written by her is not adding any
information, but maybe they can see, okay,
this is talking about Kingston, New York,
but there's a reference or description
of that directly in the text [inaudible]
they're sort of extracting knowledge
or information about, or inferring the
things [inaudible] are really helpful
and it's also helpful for them, I think, that
students start processing what is happening
in a document beyond the
specific exact thing that it says.
Another thing that I hope is helpful for
teachers is we have a whole dedicated
for educators space which we are always
updating and it's a little bit behind now
as we haven't added information
about our two most recent campaigns,
Herencia and Blackwell, but
you'll find a lot here.
And, again, it links out to our wonderful
[inaudible] materials on [inaudible]
on the teaching [inaudible] site that's,
you know, working with the primary sources.
And we also have back in this resources page
if you want to host an event with your students
so this is be particularly good
for like an after school club,
or if you're doing remote teaching, then,
and you want to kind of run an event
where the class will try to transcribe
20 pages together [inaudible].
The instructions in here might
be something you could transfer
to your new virtual teaching [inaudible].
And I think I'll stop for now
and we can open up to questions.
>> This is Kathy.
Victoria, thank you for that
really great run-through.
There was a comment that came in early in
the chat, one of our participants, Athena,
was talking about this would be a great way
to get history club students involved with,
you know, getting their hands on history
and making a significant contribution.
So exactly what you were
saying with the after school
and the hosting a transcribe-a-thon
is just a perfect fit.
I do have a question overall.
What are you hearing from educators in terms
of how they're using this in their classroom
or with their students at other
education points I should say?
>> Thank you, Kathy, and thank you,
Athena, for your question [inaudible].
I think that the main things that we're hearing
from folks are this is an especially good fit
for extracurricular or after school, or
kids who are maybe in a gifted program,
or have some kind of like built-in
[inaudible] to their schedules.
But I think this year in particular because so
much has been canceled and unsettled in terms
of testing, at least so far as I understand,
this may be a nice time to explore some
of the things you would have explored
anyway but without that same pressure.
So maybe some class time could be given over
to doing something new but in this sort of way.
And that's the thing that we
often hear from educators.
I mentioned earlier that knowing this is
real, like this is not an exercise book,
like you're really, really
making markup history.
You're really helping people who
have accessibility [inaudible].
You're really helping [inaudible].
And it's not just right now; it's forever.
We don't have any plans to
delete the text or get rid of it.
So making a lasting contribution and we
are already having researchers coming to us
and saying, "Can I have, you know, all the
transcribed words for the suffrage women,"
so that they can do a large
scale analysis of their networks
and their [inaudible] and things like that.
So I think those are some of the more
important things that we hear in the,
the things that we hear the most.
>> That's great.
Thank you.
I wonder, as we are waiting for more questions
to come in, and to our audience, please,
please feel free to text in your
questions via chat, but I wonder, Victoria,
if you could spend a little bit of
time talking about how materials
from the Library's collection make it into
the crowd site and do you have any insight
about what might be coming down the pike?
>> Ooh. Good question.
So we have a couple of criteria.
The materials have to be digitalized and on
our Library of Congress main website already.
That's partly because of the nature of
the [inaudible] but also it helps us
that there's all that incredible rich
context from our curators, and our colleagues
in Learning and Innovation,
and other parts of the Library.
We mostly have drawn the collections
from the [inaudible] exhibition,
but we actually have started
to feature other divisions.
So the American Folk Life Center, our
partners for The Man Who Recorded the Road,
and along with [Inaudible] Exhibition
and others are our partners for Herencia:
Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents,
isn't just the amazing richness, and depth,
and breadth of the [inaudible] collection
which goes into the presidential papers,
papers of Supreme Court Justices, of
little known characters in history,
more and more of whose papers
have been digitized
or I suppose will be digitized once we're
kind of back to more normal operating.
We have materials, we have a lot of suffrage
materials which we've been highlighting
because of the [inaudible] the
Nineteenth Amendment and its passage,
but we hope to keep finding opportunities
to add materials in men and women
from across the historical
spectrum from other countries.
We hope to always be diversifying
the voices of adding and trying
to make really just the full richness of
the Library's collections available here.
Things to look out for in the coming year,
we'll be adding some more [inaudible] speakers,
and we might, not 100% certain, but we
might be adding more Civil War material,
and possibly some of our earliest material
[inaudible] featuring materials that were kind
of cookbook type of books, so
like how to make [inaudible].
But that's very speculative that I [inaudible].
>> Fantastic.
Well, we won't quote you on any of this.
It's just exciting to get the inside scoop.
So for our folks on the line, if you have
any questions, feel free to chat them in.
As those are coming in, I will
give you some more inside scoops.
There will be a review transcribe-a-thon with
the National Council of Teachers of English
on May first at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.
And this is an event that we built on last
year which was a transcribe-a-thon we did
with the English Teachers and
looking at the Whitman papers.
And so now we're at a point where we
want to do a review-a-thon essentially
with the English teachers a year later.
And I will put that URL into the chat in case
you are interested in joining us for that event
that will be on May first at the
National Council of Teachers of English,
and they are hosting it but it
is totally open and totally free.
Another inside scoop I can give you is next
week's schedule for the Online Office Hours.
As you know, we are here from 2:00
to 3:00 every Tuesday and Thursday.
And next Tuesday we're going to do a tour
of the Jefferson Building which is the,
it's our workplace, and we're opening the
virtual doors to the Library of Congress.
And we'll have one of our
colleagues, [Inaudible] Fleming,
giving us a tour of the iconic Jefferson
Building and we'll learn from another colleague
of ours about how to use the Jefferson
Building as the primary source.
And next Thursday at 2:00 we're going
to start an early celebration
of Law Day which is May first.
And we'll be discussing how Library of
Congress resources can effectively support law
related education.
We'll show you what the Law Library has to
offer, and you hear tips to use these resources
in the classrooms from our civics
teacher in residence, Jen Reidel.
So hopefully you'll join us for that.
So anyway I am just going to try and catch
up and see what's happening here in the chat.
>> I had a thought, Kathy, which
was I could show [inaudible]
about as people start using the site and
we've had a lot of new users recently.
So sort of online live.
So I have logged in and I can see that I have
contributed to all of these different campaigns.
And I've done a certain number
of actions for each of them.
So but that might mean that I saved a
transcription, I submitted a page to be reviewed
by somebody else, or I reviewed a page.
And if I scroll a bit further down, I can see
broken out I campaigns, the different things
that I've done, so my actions in this column
here, the second column from the left,
the thing that I worked on,
and then its current status.
So maybe I transcribed a letter from
Lincoln's papers about a year ago,
and then somebody else has
come and completed it.
And likewise, if I scroll
down, and I scroll down.
This is perhaps helpful for people who want to
keep track of the pages or like maybe students
if they're doing for a service fulfillment.
I know that maybe a lot of people are
seeking virtual volunteering opportunities
because they don't, they're not able
to do whatever they had lined
up for their service this year.
So this can be something they can do and they
can keep track of the time that they're spending
in a spreadsheet, and then, you know, then
a screen graph us there for final to you
or to whoever they need to
give that information to.
We're also able to provide a
letter saying, "Yes indeed,
this person at this account has
[inaudible] an account and done some stuff".
But they obviously can show you that as well.
We don't track time on site.
We're very privacy oriented as an institution
so we don't want to know [inaudible] business
and their IP address or anything like that.
So that's why we can't say
exactly when somebody did something
and how long they spent on the site.
But we can, but, yeah, [inaudible].
And third helpful thing, if we don't have
any pressing questions coming through, Kathy?
>> Yep. Go ahead.
>> Great. We have a discussion area as well.
If you sign in again like By the People,
you can do more, you can [inaudible],
and like us and that sort of thing.
But you can read anything
in here without signing up.
And you can often find questions, common
questions answered in this discussion area.
The volunteers are really friendly as well
and often will answer questions before we can
which nice, nice problem to have [inaudible].
And we also keep a nice kind of running list of
the things that are maybe the most recent news,
and most common questions, or things
that people seem to be interested in.
We've got our media coverage space
as well if you're interested.
And actually we've had within the blog function
of the site so you can have a look for blogs.
We've had educators write posts for us about
using this in their classrooms and really open
to [inaudible] particularly even
[inaudible] circumstances about they're using
By the People in their virtual classrooms.
But just another thought.
>> That's great, Victoria.
That brought out a question I have which is
do you find that there are some super users
within the transcription world, that it
is something that once they get started,
they just take off, or they just,
they seem to spend a lot of time
in one collection versus another?
What are you learning about users in terms of,
not necessarily the individuals themselves,
but what people are doing in the collection?
>> You know, that's a great question.
I think every crowdsourcing project
had super users and those folks,
in my experience actually almost all of them
don't have a preexisting [inaudible] familiarity
with the topic or they might
have an adjacent interest.
So we have a number of volunteers who become
really dedicated to a particular campaigns
as we call these, you know, so Herencia,
or Alan Lomax, or Mary Church Terrell.
But they didn't come with a prior
expertise or a background and it's actually
through the transcription process
that they were falling in love
with this stuff and learning about it.
And actually in some cases really
becoming experts [inaudible] with people
who have written books on these topics, in
large part because of the amount of exposure
to these individuals' handwriting,
their documents, their history.
You know, that kind of user
is probably in the minority.
They certainly do a lot.
They contribute a thousand pages.
But they are, yeah, really often very bubbly
on the [inaudible] area as well and have a lot
to add there and hopefully are
generally encouraging to a newcomer.
That's been my experience so far.
And I think it kind of shows that
you don't need some special training
to do this and you'll learn by doing.
So we're really grateful to them and to
anybody who's willing to take a chance.
>> That's great.
So I want to thank you for a fantastic
overview to the crowdsourcing project.
If people have questions and a follow up,
I know you have pointed out the FAQ page,
and the History Hub page, and you were
very specific about the entry point
where people can go ahead and get started.
I wonder if there is anything else
that you want to share with people
if they have any follow-up questions?
>> Oh, I think probably the only thing
and I'm going to try to switch back
to my PowerPoint without it going haywire.
Are you all able to see that?
>> No. You're going to have to go to -- .
You have to go to Share, or Share.
>> There we go.
[Inaudible].
>> There you go.
>> So we have our crowd@loc.gov email address.
And, you know, if you can't find your answer
in the Help Center or on History Hub, you know,
please be in touch and we're happy to help out.
And I'm just sort of scrolling
through quickly to see
if there's anything else that I should mention.
This is the kind of backup
if anything went wrong.
But I think we've covered it.
So there's the educator space, the email list.
We can visit History Hub.
And, yeah, I think that's it.
>> Okay. We did get a question that came in.
It came in to me specifically but are you
guys open to doing a Google Hangout or a Webex
with students, with, excuse
me, a teacher who is interested
in her eighth grade students
getting involved with this project,
specifically the Women's
Suffrage and the Civil War?
And wanted to know is there an opportunity
to request a Hangout, or a Webex,
or some kind of connection
directly to her students?
>> Yeah. I think I can take that
back to the rest of the team
and see how we are on our bandwidth.
My sense is that either we could do that
or bio folks, if we want to coordinate
in case this becomes a more frequent ask, you
know, about offering semi-regular Office Hours
or maybe, you know, a just
one-off as they come up.
It would be helpful, too,
I guess we've got a couple
of the existing webinars that
might be helpful as well.
So, yeah. I think there are a
few ways we can meet those needs.
>> Okay.
>> If the person who asked maybe
wants to follow up with use
like with a bit more detail,
that might be [inaudible], too.
>> Yep. So for the person who asked
that question, I'm going to go ahead
and put my email address into the chat.
Why don't you go ahead and send me
an email after this session is over
and we can pick up with what [inaudible] -- .
I can't speak any more.
With what Victoria just offered.
So, again, thank you to our presenters.
And I am really glad that you are here.
I hope that you will think about joining all
of us on May first at the National Council
of Teachers of English where we're going to
have a review-a-thon with the Whitman papers
and I'll serve up that URL again in a second.
That is May first at 3:00
Eastern Time, free event.
And then next week on our Office Hours we
are touring the Jefferson Building from home
on Tuesday at 2:00 and we'll learn ways
to use buildings as primary sources.
And then next Thursday we have a great program,
an early celebration of Law Day and looking
at resources from the Library of Congress'
Law Library and some insights about teaching
with law from our Civics
teacher in residence, Jen Reidel.
So thank you, everyone, for joining us.
Thank you to our presenters for a
very great tour around By the People.
And we hope to see you next week.
>> Thanks for having us.