Today’s guest post is from Lauren Algee, a Senior Digital Collections Specialist in the Digital Content Management Section and a By the People community manager.**
Douglass Day 2024 marked the busiest day in the history of By the People, the Library of Congress’s crowdsourced transcription program. The transcribe-a-thon for the Frederick Douglass Papers was groundbreaking in multiple ways and marked the beginning of deeper collaboration between By the People and the Center for Black Digital Research at The Pennsylvania State University.
Every year on February 14, Frederick Douglass’s chosen birthday, the Center for Black Digital Research organizes a Douglass Day, celebration of, and day of service to, Black digital history. Since 2017, volunteers around the world have come together to transcribe and learn about an online collection of Black history and culture – the 2021 Douglass Day project was the Mary Church Terrell Papers at the Library of Congress. That day was formerly the biggest for By the People contribution… until now!
The 2024 Douglass Day service project focused on Douglass himself for the first time ever – specifically correspondence from the Frederick Douglass Papers. Frederick Douglass was one of the most influential activists, orators, and writers in history. His correspondence consists of letters received by Douglass (which documents his life as a public figure), his work as a writer and editor, and his family. By transcribing his letters in the “Yours truly, Frederick Douglass” campaign, volunteers can go behind the scenes of Douglass’s public and private life.
The Douglass transcription campaign launched on the morning of February 14, 2024. Over 8,500 people registered to participate in Douglass Day at 164 locations around the world. Local organizers hosted transcribe-a-thons at schools, libraries, and other community centers and tuned into a virtual event that included historical context, music, and, of course, birthday cake! At the close of the day, the By the People website had 123,000 page views and volunteers had started transcription for 7,500 pages, of which 1,500+ were also reviewed and completed. Transcription and volunteer review will continue until all 9,000+ pages are finalized!
The Frederick Douglass transcription campaign also prompted new opportunities for data sharing with the long-running Douglass Papers Project (DPP), which has endeavored since the 1970s to publish and annotate all of Douglass’s writings. By the People will incorporate existing DPP transcriptions of Douglass correspondence into loc.gov and the Douglass Papers Project will utilize volunteer transcriptions as the basis of their ongoing scholarly work on his correspondence.
And the By the People team is thrilled to announce that the success of Douglass Day 2024 is only the beginning! The Center for Black Digital Research and By the People recently signed a three-year agreement to both continue and deepen our collaboration on future Douglass Days to amplify the reach and audience of both organizations and create additional opportunities to share complementary knowledge and skills in outreach and public history.
**Featured title image above is courtesy of Douglass Day under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.