Welcome

Welcome and thanks

A warm welcome to all transcribers. We continue to have a great response from the local and family history communities following on from our launch. The BBC gave us tremendous coverage through BBC Radio 4 Making History, BBC1 Scotland's Reporting Scotland, and BBC History Extra, along with the Scotsman, Herald and Times picking up the story as did around 30 regional Scottish titles. Additionally, ScotlandsPeople kindly informed all of their subscribers about our project and we welcome many people from there. This has meant that we are always busy trying to keep up with the pace of enquiries from transcribers. We hope we managed to keep to our promise of providing transcriber access to everyone within 72 hours - this is a manual process, so please do be patient, especially over the weekend!

 

Transcriber access

ScotlandsPlaces makes transcriber access available to everyone who is willing to contribute to the transcription work. No experience is required and because the project is completely online you can transcribe from anywhere in the world!

 

Where to get started

Many transcribers are trying to decide where they might start. You can start anywhere and work on any type of record in any area. You may live in the north of Scotland but have interests in the Scottish Borders. Transcribe where you feel most comfortable in terms of the handwriting or local knowledge that you might have. We don't want to restrict anyone to any particular place. 

All transcribers should have transcriber access within 72 hours. That means you are ready to go. We ask however that you do a few things.

  1. Take some time to familiarise yourself with the website and the transcription system. Look at other transcribers work and identify the formats and conventions used when working on different types of records.
  2. Read our transcription guides or look at the FAQs.

 

Progress, statistics and quality control

We are pleased that so many people have already come forward from around the world to help us on this project and we are now processing transcriptions for over 2000 pages per week. We would be pleased to increase this figure. Transcription moderators are being identified from everyone gathered who can proof-check and 'sign-off' the transcriptions. We acknowledge that we will not have 100% accuracy in this work - it simply isn't possible when dealing with these types of records. Hopefully though we will manage near to 100% and a high quality level. If you feel you might be an excellent transcription moderator, drop us an email and we will review your work with a view of adding you to the transcription moderators group.

 

Thank you and tell a friend!

ScotlandsPlaces has been very much heartened by the support shown by so many people in our task ahead - a big thank you for volunteering to support the largest archival crowd-sourcing project in Scotland. We are keen however to continue and get more done to unlock the content of these records. Please tell a friend - or two! - about the project and encourage them to be involved.