Transcribe African American Perspectives in Print

This year’s project will be focused on African American Perspectives, a collection at the Library of Congress.

Interactive Tutorials

Complete Tutorials

(Click to view in full screen)

Learn about By the People

Test Your Knowledge: Cursive Handwriting

Finding Documents for Transcription

Rules for Transcribing

Submitting a Completed Transcription

Need Help?

* Practice Transcribing *

Print the DD2025 Quick Start Guide

Download the Quick Start Guide (PDF)

Teaching with By the People

Bring Douglass Day & By the People into your classroom using our instructional guide.

  • Common Core Standards
  • Entry Skills Assessment
  • Practice Questions
  • and more!

Why transcribe?

  • Be a part of collective action for Black history
  • Learn about history in a unique way
  • Participate in real history
  • Help expand access for all!

By the People at the Library of Congress

  • 24 full text datasets available online
  • 43,841 registered volunteer transcribers
  • 545,000 completed transcriptions that are in the Library of Congress’ digital collection and searchable by anyone

Welcome to By the People! Help us transcribe Library of Congress documents. Volunteer-created transcriptions will be published on loc.gov to improve search, access, and discovery of these pages from history.

Documents are transcribed and reviewed by volunteers. Review ensures transcriptions are whole and accurate. It takes at least one volunteer to transcribe a page and at least one other volunteer to review and mark it complete. Some complex documents may pass through both transcription and review many times before they are accepted as complete.

Have a question or comment about a campaign, page, or how By the People works? You have options:

  • Read through our FAQ.
  • Connect with our team and other volunteers in our discussion forum on History Hub.
  • Send us a message via the Contact Us page.

How to Get More Help

If you have a question or comment about how By the People works, or about a Campaign, item or page, connect with the By the People team and other volunteers on History Hub, a public online forum where everyone can join in the discussion. Anyone can view existing posts on History Hub, however, in order to communicate with other volunteers or ask questions to By the People, you will need to create an account, which you can do by clicking “Register” in the upper right hand corner of the site. Note that this account is completely separate from your By the People account.

If you would prefer to email a Community Manager, send By the People a message on their Contact Us page. You can also tweet questions or interesting finds to @Crowd_LOC.

If you want to contact the Douglass Day team with questions or interesting finds, post on Bluesky and tag @DouglassDay.bsky.social or use #DouglassDay.

You may also view older tutorial videos. The following videos are available on the Douglass Day YouTube channel: