Barbara, since genealogylibrary.com has all the 1850 census page images online, that one might be a duplication of effort. I often wondered if the county people would be able to work out something with them to clean up the spellings of names in their index. Like you say, it is so very hard to transcribe some of the old writing - let alone the fact the some of the census takers could care less about spelling. Many times, I have entered every imaginable spelling and then ended up just searching down the pages in a certain area and found the family. Transcribers who are familiar with many of the names in a local area are, of course, better able to "make out" some of the names. I realize that genealogylibrary is a subscription site and it would be nice if all the census transcriptions were online free, but it seems like it would be more helpful to transcribe some that are not available in book form, like you said, or digital files at all. Which brings up the next problem! Do you need transcribers who have a microfilm reader? Or would you plan to print the pages from a reader and then send to volunteers? Betty