authentication against official reference sources.
The essay explores whether some of these problems might be alleviated by enlarging the pool of contributors who are working to bring paper records into the digital era. The same “peer production” process that has allowed far-flung communities of volunteers to build large-scale informational goods like the Wikipedia encyclopedia or the Linux operating system might be harnessed to build a digital library. The essay critically reviews two projects that have sought to “crowdsource” proofreading and archiving of texts: Distributed Proofreaders, a project frequently held up as a model in the academic literature on peer production; and Wikisource, a sister site of Wikipedia that improves on Distributed Proofreaders in a number of ways. The essay concludes by offering a few illustrations meant to show the potential for using Wikisource as an open-access repository for primary source materials and scholarship, and considers some possible drawbacks of the crowdsourced approach.
I. Introduction
The digital era has exposed the limitations of paper as an archival medium. Although paper (like other forms of hard-copy) makes an excellent tool for transmitting knowledge across lengthy spans of time, it makes a poor tool for transmitting knowledge across lengthy spans of distance. A wealth of knowledge, including legal knowledge, remains effectively trapped inside paper records, where it can be used only by those with access to the physical medium in which it is contained.
The movement to digitize paper records and make them freely available online promises to liberate information, including legal information, from these physical constraints and make it accessible around the globe. The scope of the task, however, is massive and daunting. Even the best organized (and best funded) efforts, such as the Google Books project (currently the subject of copyright litigation[1]) and the Library of Congress’s efforts to scan American historical documents,[2] can only scratch the surface. Indeed, the Library of Congress recently estimated that, at its present pace, it will
