Interesting take on crowdsourced transcriptions versus ocr. See also the Atlas of Living Australia Entomology crowdsourcing portal (http://volunteer.ala.org.au/project/index/6306) and my crowdsourcing blog post (http://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2011/06/capturing-knowledge.html).

One extra thing that occurs to me is that this might be a way of engaging retirees with specialist or professional knowledge which might significantly reduce the error rate on transcription …