Celebrating Seven Years of By the People

Happy Spring to all our By the People crowdsourced transcription program volunteers! Every year, the By the People team publishes a “happy birthday to us” blog post right here on the Signal (you can check out previous years’ editions here and here).  We turned seven during the Fall of last year and we’ve been waiting to make a very exciting announcement: 

Our volunteers completed one million transcriptions!

By the People invites volunteers to dive deep into the digital collections of the Library of Congress and make connections with the people and places that make up our Nation’s history on crowd.loc.gov. Volunteers explore, transcribe, and review transcriptions to create page-level text, significantly improving the discoverability and accessibility of the Library’s digital collections. Since 2018, our intrepid By the People volunteers have participated in over 50 transcription campaigns, transcribing materials like the writings by, from, and to Leonard Bernstein, letters from Georgia O’Keeffe, and items documenting women’s lives during the Civil War. 

In addition to watching our amazing volunteers complete 1 million transcriptions in 2025, there were other major accomplishments. We welcomed our 50,000th registered volunteer and opened seven brand new campaigns for volunteer transcription, including the journals and sketchbooks of Benajah Jay Antrim, Louis M. Goldsborough’s correspondence, and the African American Perspectives in Print campaign for Douglass Day 2025. 

The By the People team also released our first-ever promotional video with the help of our colleagues from across the Library! In the short video, I walk you through a brief overview of the program, how to get started as a volunteer, and what kinds of collections you can expect to transcribe. You can watch the video below, on loc.gov, or the Library’s official YouTube channel. Doesn’t the Library’s Hispanic Reading Room just look marvelous? 

We also released a new By the People data dashboard on the About page of our website, crowd.loc.gov, to show our program’s impact in a more visual way. A huge thanks and shout out to our Design and Development team who helped us launch this long-awaited feature! 

What’s coming up in 2026?

More celebrations! If you’re a dedicated Signal reader, you probably read my fellow community manager, Lauren Algee’s, post about the volunteer transcription campaigns launched in advance of America’s 250 birthday. Lauren shared how we published “The American Revolution in Context to bring together pages that provide context for the colonial period, revolution, and early republic from across Library collections.” Those initial transcription opportunities launched in 2025 and will soon be joined by additional ones as we get closer to July 4, 2026!  

Get involved and stay in touch

We’d love to have you join us on crowd.loc.gov as our program gets ready to turn eight! And make sure you’re signed up for our official newsletter to be the first to find out when our new 250th anniversary campaigns go live. If you have questions, we’d be happy to answer them via Ask a Librarian.  

And consider this blog post an official invitation to join us at a dedicated By the People orientation session, hosted virtually online by the Library of Congress, next month. Visit the registration page on loc.gov to learn more and secure your free spot on April 9, 2026. 

Thank you to everybody who helped us go from Day 1 to Day 2555 – happy Spring!