Introducing image filters and website design changes!

We’re excited to be releasing some new features to By the People today! We’ve been hard at work over the last few months on some design changes to existing pages and a brand new feature that will allow you to adjust images to aid transcription.

Image filters

We’re extremely excited to release an image adjustment feature that has been on our wishlist since By the People launched in 2018. We've added three new filters to the image viewer that will allow you to adjust the brightness and contrast of page images – we expect this will help you better read very light or very dark pages. Access the filters by clicking on the a new filters icon at the top of the image viewer (appears in between the "flip horizontally" and "toggle full page" icons). Once you activate the filter menu you can engage and adjust the Gamma and Threshold filters or Invert the image. The filters build upon each other, meaning that you can apply more than one at a time.

Improved profile page

We've also reorganized and updated the design of the user profile page. It's now segmented into 3 tabs: your overall contributions, recent activity, and account management. We hope this change will make it easier to find and manage information about your account. Note that to improve site performance, the "Recent Pages Worked On" tab only includes data from the last six months of activity. If you aren't seeing data on your profile, try making a contribution and then refreshing the page.

Finding something to work on

You’ll also notice some changes as you browse campaigns. The campaigns page now lists active campaigns at the top, and recently closed completed campaigns appear as smaller thumbnails at the bottom. To see all completed campaigns, you can click through to a new Completed Campaigns page. We’re also very excited to display progress bars on the campaigns page. This gives more immediate context about what you might want to work on. You can immediately see which active campaigns need transcription or review and if a campaign is close to the finish line or still has a long way to go.

Individual campaign landing pages also look just a little different. This new design highlights each campaign’s progress, makes filtering pages by status more intuitive, and makes it easier to find and browse completed transcriptions published back to loc.gov.

As a reminder, By the People is powered by the open source software Concordia, developed in-house at the Library of Congress. Huge thanks to the wonderful Concordia development team for their hard work on these features and other behind-the-scenes updates that you won’t see on the site, but that help keep Library of Congress transcription running smoothly!