A heads-up if you would like to help out the British Library with a HUGE digitisation project…

The British Library launched LibCrowds in 2015 to improve access to its holdings by asking users to ‘Convert-a-Card’. Participants (including me!) are currently matching up sets of scanned catalogue cards for Chinese and Indonesian items with existing WorldCat OCLC entries to create digital catalogue entries, which will be searchable from within the Library’s online Explore catalogue.

Emma Goodliffe, a curator in the Chinese section says:

We are happy to announce that LibCrowds, the British Library’s crowdsourcing platform, has just reached the milestone of 20,000 contributions! However, there is still a long way to go … By participating in the crowdsourcing projects hosted on the LibCrowds platform, you will have a direct impact on enabling future research at the library.

No knowledge of Indonesian or Chinese is required. To find out more, search the British Library Asian & African studies blog (for ‘LibCrowds’) or the LibCrowds blog, and follow LibCrowds on Twitter.

Health warning:’Convert-a-Card’ is really quite addictive!

Photo caption: Card Catalogs at the Library of Congress by Eric Spiegel. Used under a Creative Commons license.