- May 19, 2025 - Volunteers Leverage OCR to Transcribe Library of Congress Digital Collections
- January 10, 2025 - Celebrating Six Years of By the People
- December 20, 2024 - Volunteer Vignette: History is a Living Thing
- October 24, 2024 - Transcribe Theodore Roosevelt’s Papers Online at the Library of Congress
- June 3, 2024 - Pride Month: Transcribe Walt Whitman
- May 23, 2024 - Volunteer Transcribers Needed for Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents
About By the People
The By the People crowdsourced transcription program invites volunteers to transcribe and review digital collections from the Library of Congress. Everyone is welcome to participate!
Volunteer-created transcriptions return to loc.gov, the Library’s main website, where they enable page-level keyword search and improve readability and accessibility.
Get Started
Watch our introductory video below, sign up for our newsletter to stay in touch, or review our frequently asked questions (FAQs). Then read how to get started and join in!
Volunteer Accomplishments
51,037
Registered Volunteers
1,047,347
Completed Transcriptions
1,270,678
Pages released for transcription across 50 campaigns
728,000
Completed transcriptions returned to digital collections
27
Full-text datasets of completed campaigns
Recent blog posts
Publications
- International Journal of Digital Humanities, October 23, 2024, Giving back, learning, relaxing, and having fun: personal motivations and impacts of a virtual volunteer transcription program.
- Journal of Open Humanities Data, February 4, 2022, By the People Crowdsourcing Datasets from the Library of Congress.
- Code4Lib Journal, November 5, 2019, 'With One Heart': Agile approaches for developing Concordia and crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress.
- Archival Outlook, September 2019, "And the Crowd Goes Wild!” Crowdsourcing Baseball History at the Library of Congress.
Media
Want to get in touch? Please review our frequently asked questions (FAQs) and visit our getting started guide. Additional questions can be sent to us via Ask A Librarian.
Press inquiries? Connect with the Library of Congress Office of Communications via [email protected] and include “By the People transcription” in the subject line.
Check out some of our press coverage to read what others are saying:
- The Mankato Free Press, March 22, 2024, Chalk one up for those of us who can write in - and read - cursive
- NBC News, March 9, 2024, Transcribing our oldest documents for Library of Congress
- The Post and Courier, April 4, 2023, Library of Congress crowd-sourcing info about 1865 SC petition for voting rights
- Mental Floss, May 14, 2021, The Library of Congress Needs Your Help Transcribing Clara Barton's Diaries, Correspondences, and Other Rarely Seen Papers
- Mental Floss, March 8, 2021, The Library of Congress Needs Your Help Transcribing James Garfield’s Diaries
- Smithsonian Magazine, December 4, 2020, Library of Congress Seeks Volunteers to Transcribe Letters to Theodore Roosevelt
- Mental Floss, December 1, 2020, The Library of Congress Needs Help Transcribing More Than 20,000 Letters Written to Teddy Roosevelt
- Federal News Network, August 25, 2020, Library of Congress enlisting volunteers to help transcribe documents
- The Washington Post, August 10, 2020, Lincoln’s mail included advice, warnings and a call to shoot deserters
- Fox 10 Phoenix, February 6, 2020, ‘By the People’ crowdsourcing project aims to transcribe legendary civil rights leader Rosa Parks’ papers
- Mental Floss, July 31, 2019, The Library of Congress Needs Help Transcribing 16,000 Pages of Suffragist Diaries, Letters, and Documents
- Smithsonian Magazine, July 30, 2019, The Library of Congress Needs Your Help Transcribing Suffragist Papers
- Washington Post Magazine, June 17, 2019, The National Archives has billions of handwritten documents. With cursive skills declining, how will we read them?
- Wired, April 14, 2019, Tech that connects us -- And makes us better humans