Everyone knows that people have been busy at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) digitizing the service files of the men and women who enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) during the First World War.
Now, it is disclosed that 1,000 files (which is a small sample) of the medical records section of the service files - the form of temperature charts, dental records and medical case sheets has been transcribed and given to the public.
Read about it at http://blog.muninn-project.org/node/79
The
press release says that “The transcribed data generated has value
for researchers in handwriting recognition, and archival and medical
institutions’. What about genealogists – we use these papers in our research too!
So how useful is this form of transcription? Is crowd sourcing transcription a good way to do it? How accurate will it be? They say it will be verified by computer.
2 comments:
Thought-provoking blog post...and I have to say, I'd rather have some transcription than none, because at least I can do a search using various spellings. No transcription means paging through documents one by one in the hope of finding that needle in the haystack. It's still up to me to verify the names and info on the documents, but transcription (even crowdsourced) is a step in the right direction!
Thank you for your comment, Marian.
It will be interesting to see the progress that they make. I imagine that there will be lots more 'crowd sourcing'transcritions
Elizabeth
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