Smithsonian Transcription Project

[BridgeTroll]

This is pretty cool... I have participated in a different transcription project and found it interesting and rewarding.  It is called Operation War diary.  It entails reading handwritten sometimes illegible WWI logbooks of British soldiers and typing what you read.

http://www.operationwardiary.org/#/about


Smithsonian is now opening its doors to the same citizen group effort... Sign up and give it a shot... 

https://transcription.si.edu/

The Purpose of Transcription

Our goal with this project is to make our collections more accessible and useful to curators, researchers, and anyone with a curious spirit. Because computers have a hard time understanding handwriting, many of our collections still hold many secrets and hidden knowledge inside their pages. With your help, we can bring that knowledge to life.

Searchability

Full-text transcription of documents makes them easier to search. If we want to know how many times the word "Civil War" comes up in a Smithsonian Secretary's papers or find the earliest known location of a particular plant species, we must have that writing transcribed.

Readability

Cursive is often no longer taught in schools; to preserve our society's understanding of historic documents for future generations, it is essential that we create text transcriptions of these documents.

Usefulness over Perfection

Ultimately, an imperfect transcription that is finished in a timely manner is more useful that a exhaustingly detailed and carefully scrutinized transcription that takes years to finish. Do your best but don't worry about trying to be perfect.

[Spitfire]

I've done a few transcription projects through Ancestry.com. This sounds right along those lines.

[BridgeTroll]

Access to the data within all these documents is extremely limited because the data in its original format is virtually unsearchable.  Transcription makes it possible to access historical, scientific and other without touching the actual documents...