Since University College London began transcribing the papers of the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham more than 50 years ago, it has published 27 volumes of his writings - less than half of the 70 or so ultimately expected.

Now the project’s scholars think they may have come up with a better way: crowd-sourcing.

The editors have invited anyone to help transcribe some of the 40,000 unpublished manuscripts from University College’s collection that have been scanned and put online. In the roughly four months since this experiment began, 350 registered users have produced 435 transcripts.

These transcripts, which are reviewed and corrected by editors, will eventually be used for printed editions of the collected works of Bentham.

The Bentham Project is one of the first to try crowd-sourced transcription and to open up a traditionally rarefied scholarly endeavor to the public, generating both excitement and questions.

Karen Mason, a librarian in New York City, has worked on the project . “ I usually take about 15 to 20 minutes of my lunch hour,” she wrote in an email.

Crowd-sourcing has the potential to cut years from the transcription process while making reams of documents available to the public.

“It’s fairly astonishing,” Sharon Leon, a historian at George Mason University in Virginia, said . Ms. Leon and her collaborators are working with 55,000 unpublished documents from the United States’ early War Department that have been collected, copied and reconstructed to replace those destroyed in a fire in 1800.

Yet this form of research also underscores how the digital humanities have become a new source of tension between experts and amateurs.

Max J. Evans, the former executive director of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, said he had long campaigned for using digital technology - like putting scanned originals online - as a way of widening access. But document editors tend to resist, he said.

“ I don’t know why we can’t use the images we have in an easy-to-use form without all the scholarly apparatus,” he added.

Another obstacle is practical, said Daniel Stowell, the director and editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. His office experimented with hiring nonacademic transcribers, he said, but they produced so many errors that “we were spending more time and money correcting them as creating them from scratch.”

As to whether newer endeavors like the Bentham Project will end up saving time, he said, “I’m skeptical.”

But Ms. Leon is more optimistic. “We’re not looking for perfect,” she said. “We’re looking for progressive improvement.”


By PATRICIA COHEN