N – Library outsources proofreading

“Real” libraries are struggling for survival in the digital age – but some are fighting fire with fire. The National Library of Wales, for example, is scanning in all its documents relating to Wales. These scans are converted to OCR (optical character recognition) and then need to be proofread. For proofreading, there’s the money-saving possibility of repeating a “crowdsourcing” experiment used by an Australian library, which got the public to proofread scanned texts, and found many people competing to make the most changes.

Thanks to Margaret Cooter