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June 18, 2011 by Gary Price

Digitization Projects: "University of Iowa Puts 1860s Diaries Online"

June 18, 2011 by Gary Price

From the Iowa City Press-Citizen:

A collection of pocket-sized diaries from the 1860s has created an Internet sensation for the University of Iowa library.

The diaries are part of the library’s Civil War collection employees have been working on for more than two years, digitizing pages in time for the war’s 150th anniversary in April.

“The idea is to make it as accessible as possible and not have us try to decide what people should see but make the whole body of work available to people,” said Greg Prickman, assistant head of Special Collections and University Archives who helped oversee the project.

Now library employees are taking the project a step further. They developed a website that allows members of the public to not only view the diaries but write transcriptions of the pages.

The process, known as crowd sourcing, has been around for a while, but usually requires expensive, technical software, Prickman said.

[Clip]

There have been 48,000 visits to the Civil War diaries pages in the last week alone, and the library has received more than 3,800 completed transcripts since June 8.

Once those transcripts are received, librarians edit them to ensure they’re accurate and posted online with the images, and perhaps most

importantly, Prickman said, the transcripts make the diaries searchable.

Direct to Civil War Diary Transcription Page

Direct to Entire Civil War Digital Collection

Read the Complete Article

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Libraries, Resources

SHARE:

crowdsourcingDigitized Archives & LibrariesHistoryHumanitiesU.S. Civil WarUniversity of Iowa Libraries

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.

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