“With One Heart”: Agile approaches for developing Concordia and crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress

Abstract

In October 2018, the Library of Congress launched its crowdsourcing program By the People (https://crowd.loc.gov) . The program is built on Concordia (https://github.com/libraryofcongress/concordia), a transcription and tagging tool developed to power crowdsourced transcription projects. Concordia is open source software designed and developed iteratively at the Library of Congress using Agile methodology and user-centered design. Applying Agile principles allowed us to create a viable product while simultaneously pushing at the boundaries of capability, capacity, and customer satisfaction. In this article, we share more about the process of designing and developing Concordia, including our goals, constraints, successes, and next steps.