A Gift ‘By the People’ on Bernstein’s Birthday

Leonard Bernstein’s impact on 20th-century music history and popular culture is incalculable, a fact regularly evidenced by the endless stream of researchers who come to study the Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress year after year. Since its arrival and processing, the Bernstein Collection has offered endless gifts to librarians, researchers, and visitors, allowing all of us to find new connections to a musician and teacher who left indelible marks on many lives.

Bernstein would be celebrating his 106th birthday on August 25th. As a birthday tribute, we’re excited to report that our Leonard Bernstein: Writings By, From, and To “By the People” crowdsourced transcription campaign has been completely transcribed and reviewed! That means that our amazing volunteer force transcribed nearly 16,000 pages of letters, telegrams, sketches, scripts, school assignments, and more; in addition, all pages were reviewed by another volunteer for quality control. In the coming months, Library staff will provide another layer of quality control and ultimately make these transcriptions available in the Leonard Bernstein Digital Collection. Researchers will be able to download these transcriptions and the digital collection will become keyword searchable, allowing people to find content about specific people or topics that otherwise wouldn’t be discoverable without painstakingly reading through thousands of pages. Though I called the campaign milestone a birthday tribute above, it’s truly a gift to future researchers made possible “By the People.” We’ll be sure to update our readers when the transcriptions are loaded into loc.gov.

We’d like to close out by thanking the many, many volunteers who dedicated your time, effort, and perhaps sometimes squinted eyes to this process (some of that handwriting can be tough to decipher!). Some of you have been transcribing since By the People first launched, and others came to this project via special interest in Leonard Bernstein. It’s our sincere hope that transcribing this material revealed new layers of Bernstein’s work, talent, and personality to you; in fact, we’d love to hear about favorite items you transcribed or discoveries you made in our comments below. In return, I leave you with a letter from a 6-year-old Burton Bernstein to his older brother Leonard on his 20th birthday (featured at the top of this blog post); below, take a look at the transcription captured in our campaign!

And check out more fascinating “By the People” transcription campaigns, including our Sheet Music of the Musical Theater campaign featuring more than 16,000 pieces of sheet music published between 1890 and 1922 — over half of the digital collection needs review and nearly 20% hasn’t been touched yet. Help us make our sheet music keyword searchable!