Enhancing Digitized Collections: The Transcription Project

Forrester (“Woody”) Lee of New Haven, Connecticut, spent an extraordinary amount of time carefully transcribing the phonetic spelling of the United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book and helping make this important volume more accessible to readers.

While providing collection scans online is a tremendous help to researchers who are unable to visit the Clements Library either due to the pandemic or to time or financial constraints, providing true searchability of digitized material is the gold standard.

In March 2020, the Clements Library began experimenting with a group transcription process. FromThePage, a software platform, provided the interface for collaborative transcription of online documents. The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers, one of our richest collections related to the Underground Railroad, provided the source material.

Clements staff, recently exiled from in-person contact with collections, seized the opportunity to interact with these papers remotely and at the same time provide an invaluable service to our patrons. Each page of the collection was read, puzzled over, and ultimately transcribed. Staff checked each other’s work, asked for help with difficult words, and did online research to reveal the identities of difficult-to-decipher names of historic figures. The project provided a much-needed distraction and escape from the dislocation, anxiety, and uncertainty in the early days of the pandemic.

After the initial phase of trial-by-staff, the transcription project was opened up to volunteers. Individuals and groups of persons have contributed to the transcription project. The Sarah Caswell Angell Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR) transcribed the Revolutionary War papers of Colonel Jonathan Chase, of the 13th and 15th Regiments of the New Hampshire Militia. This semester, Andrea Smeeton’s 7th grade students at East Prairie School in Skokie, Illinois, successfully transcribed selections from the letters of 19th-century writer and activist Lydia Maria Child. Many highly dedicated individuals have contributed to the completion of transcriptions for the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers, United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book, Louise Gilman Papers, African American History Collection, Samuel Latham Mitchill Papers, and James Sterling Letter Book. Some of these transcriptions are already live and available to researchers and others are awaiting final review before releasing them to the world.

Our partners in U-M Library Digital Content & Collections have merged the transcriptions with the existing digital collections to make them fully text searchable. Now, a researcher utilizing one of our transcribed collections and looking for a specific mention of a particular subject—fugitive, freedmen— receives immediate search results with the corresponding scanned pages of the original document. Previously, the search could be undertaken only by laboriously scrutinizing each document for the appearance of the word in question.

The Clements Library plans to continue to provide new collections online via FromThePage for those who enjoy the challenge of puzzling out a variety of handwriting styles and taking a closer look at the content of these remarkable resources.

—Terese Austin
Head of Reader Services

The papers of Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), a writer, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist, were among the digitized collections recently completed. In this letter from Mrs. Child to her friend Anna Loring, July 1, 1871, volunteers transcribed:

“You ask what I think concerning the political enfranchisement of women. I have for many years been decidedly in favor of it. I dont feel interested in it as a right to be claimed, but as the most efficient means of helping the human race onward to the highest and best state of society. A really harmonious structure of society requires complete, unqualified companionship between the sexes. Homes will be nobler, and capable of higher and fuller happiness, when the mothers, wives, and sisters, in families, have an understanding sympathy in the investigations of science, the designs of artists, the experiments of the agriculturist, the enterprises of the merchant, the inventions of the machinist, the labors of the mechanic, the theories of politicians, and the guidance of statesmen. And in order to have an understanding sympathy with these things, they must have part and portion in the performance of them.”