Major grant awarded to Zooniverse

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The Institute for Museum in Library Services (IMLS) in the USA has awarded 1.27 million dollars to the 'Transforming Libraries and Archives through Crowdsourcing' project, a research partnership between English and Astrophysics in Oxford, and the Adler Planetarium Library (Chicago). Dr Victoria Van Hyning, the Humanities PI of Zooniverse who is based in the English faculty, led the grant-writing effort with Professor of Astrophysics Chris Lintott, the Zooniverse PI, and Dr Laura Trouille, head of Citizen Science at the Adler. The grant will greatly expand the capacity for libraries and archives around the world to use crowdsourcing techniques to engage with audiences, improve access to digital collections, and conduct humanities research. The project team will develop new text and audio transcription projects and tools, including new free tools that will enable anyone to create their own transcription project. The Faculty of English will administer around a sixth of the grant over three years.