Summary

  • Smithsonian's Transcription Center invited the public to turn digitised collections into searchable text, with volunteer review and institutional approval built into the work.
  • Its early indexing rule made completing an entire project essential; short review challenges helped direct attention to the unfinished business.

The last page of a notebook rarely gets the glamour. The opening page promises an expedition; the final one may offer another date, another plant and the handwriting of somebody who would rather be outdoors. At Smithsonian's early Transcription Center, finishing that page's review could help unlock a whole notebook for search. The internet had found a consequential use for doing the boring bit.

A November 2013 invitation from Smithsonian Institution Archives explained the job in wonderfully physical terms: read documents, then keyboard them so their words could be searched. A scan gave somebody an image to inspect. A transcription gave the collection another way to answer a question. Between those two conveniences sat a person squinting at handwriting.

A museum visit with a keyboard attached

The institution's Office of the Chief Information Officer created the centre in June 2013. In their 2016 account of the project, Lesley Parilla and Meghan Ferriter described an interface with the image on the left and a space for transcription on the right. Volunteers could roam among collections. Page states showed work awaiting transcription, awaiting review or complete. Somebody else's difficult notebook was now a browser activity.

The arrangement distributed distinct jobs. Anyone could transcribe, including anonymous visitors; registered volunteers could review. Staff approved pages after transcription and review. Once all an item's pages had been reviewed, the text became available as a PDF and searchable through the institution's Collections Search Center. The useful endpoint was a finished item that a future researcher could find.

That work acquired a social life. Ferriter's July 2014 project update described a notes box introduced that spring, where volunteers and staff could exchange information. Some volunteers watched the latest updates to find projects needing help. Ellsworth Paine Killip's 1944 Colombia field notes supplied a concrete result: 59 pages, fully transcribed and reviewed by 12 volunteers. A notebook associated with one botanist had become a small collective reading exercise.

The search box wanted the whole thing

Freedom to wander made the site inviting. It also left the coordinator with an awkward imbalance: transcription was moving quickly, while reviews lagged. The 2016 paper explains why this mattered. Text could be indexed only after every page in a project had passed peer review. An almost-finished notebook could therefore sit outside that completed-text search service, however impressive its progress looked.

The response included week-long review challenges, such as the April 2015 Seven-Day Review Challenge. Participants were asked to concentrate on reviews and completion; daily totals made the collective progress visible. The invitation had become more specific than “come and help”. Here was work already close to being useful, and here was a short stretch in which to finish it.

There is a pleasing reversal here. Museums had spent years inviting people to look at things through glass. This website invited people to take a share of the work behind the glass. The successful handover depended on page states, conversation, checking and someone noticing what remained undone. Search looked effortless at the end because the effort had happened elsewhere.