500 … Every Little Bit Helps

Well I did it, I have finally made it to 500 lines of text corrected on Trove (well, acutally a little more as you can’t just correct half of an article). I know in the whole big scheme of things it’s just a drop in the ocean, but hey, it’s still 500 lines that otherwise may not yet be corrected.

Now anyone who is a regular “Trover” (do you like my new word?), will be familiar enough with the picture below as it is a screenshot of the Trove newspapers homepage. For those who may not be so familiar … let me tell you that Trove is FREE, and you can search by keyword/s, or browse by area, or by paper.  As at 25 June 2013 there are 10,006,450 digitised newspaper pages online consisting of 101,614,442 articles available to search.

Now these newpapers are all scanned and uploaded, but due to the condition of the paper and/or the printing, not everything gets OCR’d correctly, so there are bits that need correcting, and that’s where volunteers are helping out by doing so. I tend to browse or find an article, and if I find it’s not corrected I then do it … simple!

If you have created a User Account on the National Library of Australia/Trove website, and log in before correcting text, the details of your corrections are all noted, so that you can see at a glace how many lines you’ve done each month, as mine does below.They even have a Hall of fame which lists the top text correcters, together with where you sit in the list. Ok so I’m a little down the list a number 6533, but that’s ok, as I’m proud to have contributed to a wonderful cause, and I’m not planning on stopping. But I must say that I am in awe of those who have cracked the one million mark, that’s just simply IMPRESSIVE. I mean I’m not even to 1000 yet, let alone 1,000,000. But I just keep telling myself every little bit helps, because I know it really does!

While browsing their website for info on this post, I came across this chart showing the coverage of the all the newspapers for all of the states. It’s an impressive list isn’t it. But it’s exciting to see what is still hopfully coming too.