If you have the itch to do some transcribing, check out the newly launched Library of Virginia site "Making History":
http://www.virginiamemory.com/transcribe/
We would love to have you involved!
Gregg
Gregg D. Kimball, Director
Public Services and Outreach
Library of Virginia
804-692-3722 (w)
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-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Huffstutler, Eric S.
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2014 9:30 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Cloud Sourcing
Great idea. I see the Crowd Sourcing is starting to take off and I had thought about transcribing some documents myself. I work at a law firm and if I can read a variety of these people's handwriting I can read just about anything! :-)
Eric Huffstutler
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lyle E. Browning
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2014 9:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [VA-HIST] Cloud Sourcing
I've spent a few very aggravating days trying to find survey plats from the post-revolution era. LVA has put the entire grant system online and it is immensely valuable. But for those of us who live for a good plat, life is not so good. There are two microfilm rolls with of the indices of the Survey Books. the problem with them is that for some years, there are as many as 8 separate rolls of microfilm that cover those years, and there are rolls of microfilm that do not have indices at the beginning. And the indices are incredibly confusing as they hop, skip, and jump around, not to mention overlap and so forth.
What is really needed is for those two rolls of microfilm to be put into a spreadsheet so that they can be sliced and diced and things actually found without literally hours looking. And if you can't find them, as I often couldn't, then I'd have to go to the actual archival warrants and look through individual folders, one warrant at a time. Monday, I went through literally 5 folders of "M"'s before I found the one warrant I needed. Multiply that by all the time we've all done that and it's absolutely decades. There's a better way with a little drudgery for us all, but in the end, we can forget all that time wasted.
What I thought about is crowd-sourcing of a sort. If there were volunteers who would agree to take 5 pages and put them into some form that could then be massaged into a spreadsheet, using all the same info that's on the rolls, we'd have a tremendous resource in less than a year. Mountains can be moved, one shovel full at a time. This is our mountain.
Just think how many hours each of you who uses those things have spent looking through trying to find a plat and if just a fraction of that was put into transcribing them into an electronic format, we'd all be in far better shape. I've thought of doing it, but I don't have the time to spend, but a few hours, sure, no problem.
Anybody interested?
Lyle Browning
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