Welcome to Trexler Transcribes

Welcome to Trexler Library's crowdsourced transcription portal. This initiative is an opportunity for you to contribute to digital scholarship at Muhlenberg College by helping us to convert our unique digitized holdings into searchable text that is more accessible to researchers. 

Over the last decade, crowdsourced transcription has become an invaluable tool,  gaining popularity through widely known projects such as By the People from the Library of Congress and What's on the menu? from the New York Public Library. By definition, crowdsourced transcription is the act of enlisting dedicated digital volunteers to transcribe handwritten or typed historical documents. Volunteer-created transcriptions allow for improved researching, readability, and wide accessibility to historic content and materials, which, in many cases, may only be publicly available for the first time thanks to these volunteer contributions.

While artificial intelligence is ever-improving in its ability to read handwritten script, most of our manuscript collections contain so many different hands that a machine would not be able to "learn" enough volume to read them accurately. 

So we need your help! If you enjoy history and puzzles, be a part of sharing newly-uncovered content with the world. Become a volunteer Trexler Transcriber!

The inaugural collection in this long-planned portal is the Muhlenberg Family Papers Collection. We hope that this project will excite members of the Muhlenberg community and beyond!