The popular and much loved G R Macdonald Dictionary of Canterbury Biography is getting an update for the 21st century. Comprised of over 12000 index cards with biographical information on over 22000 people, the dictionary took about 12 years to complete. Since then it has been accessed by hundreds of people wanting to know more about nineteenth century Canterbury personalities. Compiled between 1952 and 1964, the dictionary was considered progressive for its inclusion of people from all strata of society. While a monumental achievement, one of the dictionary’s weak spots has been a lack of information on women and children. Most of the entries are organised by male heads of household with women relegated to the role of wife or daughter. In an effort to make women and children more easily findable, a joint public history project between Canterbury Museum and the University of Canterbury is underway. The aim is to tag names mentioned in the dictionary, prioritising those of women and children. This paper will relate our findings from two stages completed so far. First, a student intern analysed the options for transcribing and tagging names and has developed a project scoping report on crowdsourcing this work. Second, a trial crowdsourcing project was conducted with a group of history students at the University of Canterbury, using the open source Pybossa framework. Future work includes developing a wider crowdsourcing effort based on the trial by bringing in contributors from the public and further project partners.
