In 2016, William & Mary (W&M) Libraries took the lead on a transcription project for the approximately 450,000 pages or 65,000 items in the British Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period (1714-1837) after becoming partners with the Royal Collection Trust and King's College London in the Georgian Papers Programme (GPP). The GPP partnership members realized immediately that a multifront approach to the transcription was required and selected a variety of solutions that ranged from online crowd-sourcing to the handwritten text recognition tool, Transkribus (developed by the European Union funded READ project). At the start of the project, W&M Libraries had a newly formed Digital Services team, a legacy Omeka-Scripto transcription site, and a university community with an emerging hunger for digital humanities but no current programs. This presentation will briefly describe the project's transcription strategies and the ways W&M Libraries' work on the GPP is making an impact at W&M in digital humanities. It will highlight the opportunities we are creating for students from multiple disciplines to participate in the project and gain real-world digital humanities experience, the new collaborations that have evolved, and, finally, how the project is transforming the perception of the library.
http://transcribegeorgianpapers.wm.edu/
https://www.rct.uk/collection/georgian-papers-programme
https://georgianpapersprogramme.com/
