On Thursday, March 19, 2020, the Law Library of Congress, in collaboration with By the People, the Digital Collections and Management Services Division, the Hispanic Division, and the African, Latin American, and Western European Division of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate , held the first ever all-virtual Transcribe-a-thon to celebrate the launch of our new crowdsourcing campaign, Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents. This marks the first collection to feature items in languages other than English including Spanish, Latin and Catalan. The collection contains print and manuscript documents from Spain from the 15th through the 19th centuries including royal decrees, papal bulls, legal opinions, judgments, and royal orders.
Throughout the day, staff live tweeted progress on the project, fielded questions on History Hub and Web/Ex, and shared all of our enthusiastic transcribers’ progress. Work was begun on 45 new documents and 19 completed the process of transcription. By the end of the Transcribe-a-thon, a total of 104 completed documents. As of today, we have a total of 194 completed documents in the collection from 199 contributors.
If you’d like the Law Library to host event like this, tweet at us with your feedback at @LawLibCongress or at @Crowd_LOC.
Learn more about transcribing this historical collection by watching our previous webinars:
How and Why to Transcribe Herencia / Password: RtXH4sM@
Cómo y por qué transcribir Herencia / Contraseña: fQ7SJjZ@
What to Expect at the Transcribe-a-thon (or How to Hold your Own) / Password: xPQ8gRM*
Como organizar un maratón de transcripciones de By the People / Contraseña: nGkERe3$