In recent years the amount and types of documents that have been digitized have drastically increased. Some of this has not been so much due to the work of digital specialists, but rather because ordinary individuals can now participate in digitizing documents through various projects. I myself, recently contributed to two digital projects. I transcribed part of a document for the War Papers project. Admittedly, I found this work to be quite difficult because of the many words that were hard for me to make out and thus transcribe. In addition, interface of the War Papers project was kind of lackluster and needs to become more user friendly and engaging. However this would be a great project to contribute to if you are someone who enjoys transcribing and particularly if you are interested in American wars.

I had a completely different experience when contributing to the Building Inspector project. This project asks individuals to verify if their maps of buildings in New York, match their computer generated outlines of these buildings. The other tasks of this project asks contributors to place pins around the perimeter of buildings on the map they provide. Together these two tasks help generate accurate maps of New York for the city’s library. Overall, I found verifying the outlines of buildings and placing pins around them to be quite easy. Thus this I feel this project to be much more user friendly. I especially found the introduction videos showing users how to complete the task to be helpful.

Overall, crowdsourcing can prove quite useful to digital projects. However it is important to make contributing to the project, easy and somewhat rewardable.