 The idea for a transcribathon, I must confess, came from information about an earlier transcribathon sponsored by the Smithsonian organization. And once seeing that, or Smithsonian Institution, well, what a wonderful, efficient way for us to dive into this mass of papers and begin to re-acquaint ourselves with Julian Bond. To our great surprise, the impact of the transcribathon itself, we felt immediately, largely through reports from people who participated. What they reported to us was a sense of deep fulfillment at being engaged with these materials, that they felt they were doing more than simply transcribing words from a page into a computer, but they were actually engaged with this figure, whose words dating decades back, in many cases, decades before, still retain their relevance, and their importance. For the Carter G. Woodson Institute, it's been wonderful for that part of our mission that is connected to public outreach, that we were enabled to undertake a project that involved us so directly with the community, was quite wonderful for us as a fulfillment of our lifelong mission to have whatever we do have relevance for, implications for the broader public. Anyone with a mass of materials awaiting transcription or digitization has this as a possibility. I think the others especially interested in the parts of this project that are highly democratic. We don't think typically about ordinary citizens participating in the life and development of academic scholarship. With this transcribeathon, we kind of demystify or certainly hope we were demystifying the process of engaging in academic scholarship, what it means to do academic scholarship. Colored conventions meetings happened all over North America, and this is why the records of those meetings have been found in archives all over the United States and other countries as well. This is also why we've been so committed to drawing in contributors and partners from many places, because we depend on them to submit previously unavailable minutes and other documents we can add to our database. You could say our project follows in the archival footsteps of the colored conventions movement. Absolutely agree with that Curtis. As you well know, one of the core principles of the colored conventions project is to mirror the spirit, the organizing structure, and the focus of the actual original colored conventions themselves. When we had our first public facing initiative, which was to crowdsource transcribing our archives, we got in contact with African American churches where the original conventions had been held. It was important to us to make sure that current congregations had an opportunity to not only interact with this history, but to be participants in making it present and relevant to this current generation. So as a consequence, we had hundreds of African American church members transcribing 19th century texts. It was a wonderful experience. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition seeks research audiences as diverse as the historical people whose lives it documents. Housed within a state historical agency, the project takes seriously its engagement with researchers, students, and history enthusiasts wherever they are within or outside of Kentucky. Civil War Governors has also included emerging scholars in the work of the project itself, recruiting graduate students and U.S. history programs across the country to contribute research and build new nodes on our historical social network. Through that collaborative work, the students gain insight into the funding and administration of the types of large-scale research projects which they might establish and lead later in their careers. Through K-12 lesson plans, social media outreach, and in-person programming for family and local history groups, Civil War Governors embraces its open accessibility to welcome new learners into the same universe of historical documents and historical individuals that its scholarly users investigate. We noticed when we spoke off campus to groups of senior citizens that they were both utterly fascinated by the project, by the family letters themselves, by the discussion of the 19th century. And when we projected images, the digital images up onto a screen, they were extremely facile in being able to read the 19th century cursive handwriting. This is something that the students have always struggled a bit with because they didn't learn as much about cursive handwriting themselves in school. And then we also noticed that the senior citizens had a vocabulary that stretched to 19th century usages of terms in the ways that, again, challenged the students. So it occurred to us that maybe if you brought together the students who have all the technical skills associated or quickly learned them for digitizing these letters and for building and designing and building a website transcribing and annotating and manipulating the images of what they're doing, we bring them together with the senior citizens. Maybe we've got two different skill sets that would be very complementary. And what we found when we did this, when we brought together senior citizen volunteers to work with us on this transcription and annotation, was that they loved working with the students and the students loved working with them. So we were expanding the project, the reach of the project, and we were also having a lot more fun in expanding the educational experience associated with the project as well. Ultimately, we also realized that we were increasing our productivity and that we were getting more letters transcribed, annotated, coded and posted on the website because the senior citizens were very, very fast once we trained them in doing the transcription and annotation. On the website that the students designed and that we, with the help of library staff, have built sewerproject.org, we've documented all the pedagogy, all the rules, all the guidelines for what we're doing and how to train people to do this kind of work. We also have on the website videos that highlight some of the dimensions that we're talking about right now of this project and we've got other images that show the process by which the students and the volunteers work together on these 19th century letters.