The U.S. Library of Congress will introduce a crowdsourcing program on Wednesday, Oct. 24, in an effort to facilitate access to its physical and digital collections through tagging and transcription.A blog post published Wednesday says the program is part of its new Digital Strategy and strategic plan, which seeks to facilitate connections with citizens through a digitally enabled, data-driven and user-centered approach.
The Digital Strategy aims to leverage technology to build up the library’s services, address geographical divide, expand reach and access and optimize resources through investment and connections.
The institution also announced the appointment of three new staff members who will form a group of community managers to oversee the crowdsourcing practice.
Lauren Algee, formerly digital curation librarian at DC Public Library, will join the Library of Congress Labs team that is now part of the digital strategy office led by Kate Zwaard, head of digital strategy.
Elaine Kamlley, who came from the General Services Administration’s 18F unit, will serve as technical project manager and oversee the open-source development of the transcription and tagging application Concordia.
Victoria Van Hyning, who oversaw the development of research and humanities projects at crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse.org, will help establish a process to determine collections that would benefit from transcription with the institution’s library services directorate.
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