The National Library of Australia’s cultural heritage discovery service, Trove, is calling for volunteers to open books on Australian History.
Announcing the call, the Library said it recently rolled out text correcting for historical magazines, newsletters, almanacs and books.
“Trove volunteers – or Voluntroves – have been making recorded history easier to find online since 2009,” the Library said.
“One of the ways they have done this by accurately transcribing text from scanned newspapers – commonly known as text correcting – so it becomes part of the Trove search engine,” it said.
“And now, volunteers can do the same for some magazines, newsletters, almanacs, and books.”
The Library said editing text to match articles made searching the Trove collection more successful for everyone.
It said that as part of the expansion to text correcting, people would notice some new features on Trove’s website, including the availability of text correcting for digitised magazines, newsletters, almanacs and books; new categories in its text correction hall of fame; and a new ‘item can be text corrected’ label on non-newspaper items that could be text corrected.
“Since text correcting was introduced to Trove, our community of volunteers have text corrected more than 400 million lines of text,” the Library said.
“In 2021, our volunteers averaged 3.5 million lines of text per month!
“But we’ve got miles to go before we sleep.”
It said the Trove website contained 35,000 fully digitised books and approximately 51,000 magazines and journals.
The Library said there were currently over five million images of magazines, newsletters and books available for volunteers to transcribe.
“For the best experience, we recommend finding articles on topics that interest you, such as your hobbies or family history,” it said.
“You will get to explore a topic you love, while making it more discoverable in Trove.”
Further information on text correcting on Trove can be accessed at the National Library at this PS News link.
