Besides By the People, are there other crowdsourcing projects at the Library?
The Library of Congress has long invested in building digitized collections and making them searchable. The first attempt recruiting members of the public to increase findability of online collections began in 2008 when the Prints and Photographs Reading Room published thousands of photographs on Flickr Commons. This long-running project invites visitors to help identify people and places in the photographs and, once verified, this rich information is used to enhance the online catalog and improve access for all users. Read more about the Flickr project here.
The LC Labs experiment Beyond Words, which invited users to identify cartoons and photographs in the Library's historic newspaper collections, was the direct forerunner to By the People and directly informed our program and platform development.
Another ongoing crowdsourcing effort for Library of Congress collections is the the Archive of American Public Broadcasting project Fix It+, which invites you to review transcription of public television programs, including some from the Library.
Visit the By the People website to transcribe Library of Congress digital collections. Volunteer transcriptions help make Library collections more discoverable and accessible for all.