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Eduard Hackel (1850–1926) was an Austrian botanist best known for his pioneering work on grasses (Poaceae), becoming one of the most famous and respected agrostologists of his time.In 2024, the botanical department of the Natural History Museum of Vienna received as a donation a collection of more than 700 letters sent to Eduard Hackel between 1870 and 1932 by botanists writing from 40 different countries, in 6 different languages. In botany, supplementary materials, such as the personal correspondence of scientists, field notes or diaries, hold a great potential, since they might contain the only documentation of a scientist’s thought processes, ideas and observations, filling in gaps on missing or poorly documented specimens and ideas. They may record information that is otherwise hard to deduce from the specimens alone, which can be vital for scientific research (Rinaldo et al. 2013). In order to make the information contained in these types of materials findable and searchable by anyone and from anywhere, it needs to be digitised and transcribed. Transcription projects are time consuming, intellectually intensive, and expensive for an organisation to set up and manage. Crowdsourcing is a sustainable strategy for transcribing large collections and enhancing descriptive metadata. Despite the increasingly prominent role of artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing is still an indispensable part of the future of libraries, museums, and archives because it solves problems, strengthens the sense of community between the users and the public, adds value to the collection, and creates engagement.The value of scientists’ private correspondence as an historical source has been recognised for a long time already, but recently the concept of "correspondence networks," which connect several people into webs of exchange, became distinct objects of historical studies themselves. (Ogilvie 2016). The transcription process started with the use of the AI-powered platform Transkribus, which enables the transcription of handwritten ... |