The Newberry in the Time of COVID-19 The heart of the Newberry may be the collection, but the soul of the library is the community that coalesces around it. The Newberry’s community of learning transcends the walls of any physical space. It is blossoming online during these uncertain times.
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aunched in 2017, Newberry Transcribe enables users anywhere in the world to view and digitally transcribe more than 50,000 pages of letters and diaries from archival collections held at the library. The website makes accessible to anyone with an Internet connection a wealth of manuscript material, including Revolutionary War business records, diaries of nineteenthcentury settlers, letters written by Willa Cather, and much more. Anyone who chooses to can help make these materials more accessible by transcribing them, turning handwritten words into machine-readable data that researchers can find more easily using keyword searches. And they can do this work even while living under stay-at-home orders in this new world of being #alonetogether.
Newberry Transcribe has been popular from its start three years ago. Between 2017 and March 2020, users had transcribed almost 20,000 pages of the site’s nearly 50,000 total pages. During the last two weeks of March 2020, after the Newberry temporarily closed due to public health concerns over COVID-19, visitors transcribed an additional 5,100 pages, raising the total number of transcribed pages on the site to more than 25,600—a 25 percent increase in just two weeks! “Participatory resources are always popular,” says Jennifer Dalzin, Director of Digital Initiatives and Services at the Newberry. “But with so many people conf ined to their homes, we’ve seen an unprecedented surge in new volunteers and activity. Newberry Transcribe offers users
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