“As the community manager for collections and data, I work with the By the People team, curators and educators to identify and present collections in ways that appeal to volunteers, while also generating high quality transcription data. We started out as a pilot project in October 2018 and graduated to being a permanent project in early 2020.
“My Job: Victoria Van Hyning,” Library of Congress Blog, 4/20/20
Our team has designed and launched 15 collections-based campaigns in a year and a half. These feature the papers of Rosa Parks; letters sent to President Lincoln; the papers of suffrage leaders Mary Church Terrell and Susan B. Anthony; and the field notebooks of ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax, among others. Volunteers have transcribed over 113,000 pages so far, which is a testament to their enthusiasm!
Blog Posts
- “Finding By the People Transcriptions in the Library’s Digital Collections,” The Signal Blog, Library of Congress, 7/9/20, https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2020/07/finding-by-the-people-transcriptions-in-the-librarys-digital-collections/
- “Five Questions with Victoria Van Hyning, Senior Innovation Specialist and Community Manager, By the People,” Teaching with the Library of Congress Blog, 6/23/20, https://blogs.loc.gov/teachers/2020/06/five-questions-with-victoria-van-hyning-senior-innovation-specialist-and-community-manager-by-the-people/
- “My Job: Victoria Van Hyning,” Library of Congress Blog, 4/20/20, https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2020/04/my-job-victoria-van-hyning/
Media Coverage
- “By the People: Rewriting American history without changing a word,” TV spot, WYFF News 4, 4/17/20, https://www.wyff4.com/article/by-the-people-rewriting-american-history-without-changing-a-word/32238052#
- “A guide to the internet,” by Andrea Roberson and Alex Tatusian, LA Times , 4/2/20, https://www.latimes.com/projects/guide-to-the-internet/#be-helpful
- “How to Help Librarians and Archivists From Your Living Room: If you’re cooped-up and curious, use your free time to decipher handwriting, tag images, and more,” by Jessica Leigh Hester, 3/23/20, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/archives-to-browse-from-home
- “You Can Help the Library of Congress Transcribe Walt Whitman’s Poems and Letters: Roughly 1,860 transcriptions still need to be reviewed,” by Megan Overdeep, Southern Living, 3/2/20, https://www.southernliving.com/news/walt-whitman-library-of-congress-transcribe?
- Radio interviewee for Brigham Young University, 30 minute “Constant Wonder” program, alongside Janice Ruth, Acting Chief of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, on the theme of Suffrage and crowdsourcing (8/14/19).
- “Write history for the Library of Congress’ crowdsourcing project: Transcribe historical documents for By the People ,” Barbara Krasnoff, The Verge, 8/14/19, https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804361/historical-documents-library-of-congress-by-the-people-crowdsourcing-project-transcription.
- “Library of Congress Seeks Help Transcribing Suffragist Documents,” Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot , 8/2/19, https://bookriot.com/2019/08/02/library-of-congress-seeks-help/.
- “The Library of Congress Needs Help Transcribing 16,000 Pages of Suffragist Diaries, Letters, and Documents,” Ellen Gutoskey, Mental Floss , 7/31/19, http://mentalfloss.com/article/593040/library-congress-needs-help-transcribing-suffragist-documents.
- “The Library of Congress Needs Your Help Transcribing Suffragist Papers,” Brigit Katz, Smithsonian Magazine , 7/30/2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/library-congress-needs-your-help-transcribing-suffragist-papers-1-180972677/.
- “The National Archives has billions of handwritten documents. With cursive skills declining, how will we read them?”, Debra Bruno, Washington Post (Lifestyle Magazine) , 6/17/19, https://wapo.st/2WN29FG.
- “Tech That Connects Us—and Makes Us Better Humans,” Wired, 5/14/19, https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-better-humans/
- “Library of Congress Launches Crowdsourcing Platform,” Library Journal , 11/29/18, https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=181129LCcrowdsourcing
Campaigns
‘Letters to Lincoln’; ‘Clara Barton: ‘Angel of the Battlefield'”; ‘Whitman at 200’; ‘Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words’; ‘Branch Rickey: Changing the Game’ Suffrage 100 — including Elizabeth ‘Cady Stanton Papers’; ‘Susan B. Anthony Papers’; ‘Anna Dickinson Papers’; ‘Carrie Chapman Catt Papers’ and ‘Mary Church Terrell: Advocate for African Americans and Women’; ‘Seers, Spiritualists, and the Spirit World: The experiments of Frederick Hockley’; ‘The Blackwells: An Extraordinary Family’; ‘Rough Rider to Bull Moose: Letters to Theodore Roosevelt’; ‘Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents’; ‘Organizing for Women’s Suffrage: The NAWSA Records’; ‘Ordinary Lives in George Washington’s Papers: The Revolutionary War’; ‘Civil War Soldiers: “Disabled but not disheartened”‘; ‘”This Hell-upon-earth of a Prison”: Samuel J. Gibson’s Andersonville Diary’; ‘The Man Who Recorded the World: On the Road with Alan Lomax’;