Last year we reported that the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation project had kicked off and that one of its features was that users could correct mistakes in the optical character recognition process. A review of this crowdsourcing has been available for some time, but only just came to my attention via eGov.au

Rose Holley writes  “Users have demonstrated a willingness to work towards the ‘common good’, to volunteer their time, energy, skill, knowledge and ideas and to be involved long term in a program of national historic significance. The collaborative activity from this new community is enhancing the quality of the data and therefore the accuracy of full‐text searching in a way that the National Library of Australia could never have achieved using its own resources alone.”

Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers by Rose Holley. (March 2009) ISBN 978‐0‐642‐27694‐0