Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/29

2010] joining the corrected text pages together to form a consolidated e-text—can be crowdsourced.

The Wikisource process has already been used to make some texts of interest to the legal community freely accessible online. Indeed, Wikisource now hosts some texts that are not yet freely available anywhere else, such as key portions of the legislative history for the landmark Copyright Act of 1976. In an ongoing experiment to use the site to expand the availability of historical materials, the present author made over 70,000 pages of scanned images (taken mostly from the Library of Congress’s outstanding American Memory project ) and raw OCR text, representing the first forty-three volumes of the United States Statutes at Large, available for proofreading and correction on Wikisource. At the time of this writing, all the public and private laws and resolutions of the First United States Congress, which sat in three sessions from March 4, 1789 to March 3, 1791, have been proofread and made publicly available by users of the site. Other selected statutes and proclamations within the scanned collection have also been proofread by users with an interest in particular issues or periods in American legal history. The material proofread to date represents a very small fraction of the full dataset comprising the early volumes of the Statutes at Large. Nevertheless, sufficient progress has occurred so