Like many cultural heritage institutions, the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Louisville faces the dichotomy of material abundance and budgetary scarcity. Driven by the desire to make historical primary sources accessible online, this organization harnessed the power of the public to transcribe the Louisville Leader, an historic African American newspaper. The first sections of this article define crowdsourcing and describe how it was implemented at the University of Louisville, including the tools adopted and the process used. The latter sections outline the marketing strategy, the public response, and lessons learned from this ongoing project.
Howard, Rachel I., Caroline Daniels, Terri Holtze, and Randy Kuehn. “Community as Resource: Crowdsourcing Transcription of an Historic Newspaper.” Journal of Electronic Resource Librarianship 26(1) (2014): 36-48.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1941126X.2014.877332.