By The People Transcription Project

Go to the LOC By the People website to see collections currently being transcribed such as, "Clara Barton: Angel of the Battlefield," "Ordinary Lives in George Washington's Papers," "Walt Whitman," and "Organizing for Women's Suffrage: The NAWSA Records." This is the page you should go to to start transcribing.

Register for an account to track your work, add tags and review transcriptions. To sign up, please provide a username, email address and a strong password. Once you click register, the Library of Congress will send you an email to confirm your address. They may use this email address to communicate with you about account activity, website updates, and, occasionally, to ask for your feedback. You do not need to register to participate in transcribing, but you will not be able to track your work or have access to more advanced features such as tagging and reviewing other people's transcriptions to make corrections.

The Welcome Guide provides overall instructions for the project, transcription guidelines and standards, and instructions on how to review and tag pages if you are a registered user of the site.

This page explains the By the People transcription conventions. It explains what you should do if you can't read part of a word or an entire word in the middle of a sentence, if you come across abbreviations, if some text on the document is written in the margins, etc.

A handout of quick tips from the By the People website.