Mitchell, again, the problem is that I doubt paying someone in Australia is going to save me money, but I appreciate the offer.

All of which is not to say that I’m only interested in saving money. I’m also curious to know what the options are in case I don’t find enough people locally. (I guess at some level that’s still cost-related. If I had an unlimited budget then I guess I’d likely find people locally no matter what.)

Your project sounds like Data Entry. There are many marketplaces that offer Data Entry workers, but here is why oDesk is the site you should try:

(Full disclosure: I am oDesk’s Director of Marketing)

Talent. oDesk has over 3,000 providers with skills ranging from programming to tech writing to data entry. Over 200 oDesk providers offer data entry services. You can choose from individual freelancers or a dedicated co-located team. Data entry workers typically charge $5-10/hour. For example, click here to see a co-located firm that specializes data entry. Check their oDesk Feedback score to see the ratings they received from their past clients.

Hourly Flexibility. Most of the sites you listed offer fixed bid projects. Fixed bid is problematic for ongoing data entry tasks – do you really know exactly how long your project will take to complete? The vendors don’t either. oDesk lets you hire workers on an hourly basis. You can give them work for 1 hour, 100 hours, or 1,000 hours. It’s totally flexible, and you can stop at any time. There are no minimum commitments.

Tools. oDesk is the only service that lets you see what the workers are doing. Buyers can see screenshots of the workers activity. This ensures that you only pay for time worked on your project, and also lets you spot check the work as it is performed, to ensure that your requirements are being met.

To learn more, watch our video tour.

To get started, first create an account, and then post a job description.

See what buyers have to say about oDesk.

What do you think? Is this what you’re looking for? Is there anything about our site or service that you don’t like? Let us know. You can email me at jason[at]odesk[.]com

Regards,
Jason Chicola
Director of Marketing
http://www.odesk.com

First, thanks for the various helpful suggestions.

Second, please note that I’ve already done work of this sort and I will be the one using the output so yes, I am aware of what is the optimal format for later purposes.

Third, I have looked into automating the process, I have looked into it several times, in fact. But what I need is not that obvious to automate especially given the parameters of the project. So yes, while I do have keylogs of what people typed in, that is a TINY fraction of the data I need in the end. Of course, I continue to look for automated solutions and welcome feedback. But please don’t assume that I have no idea what I’m doing here.

Fourth, I do hire undergrads, but wanted to look into some alternatives. Undergrads often have a lot of other things going on in their lives and aren’t always as efficient as I’d like. So while I’ve had some great undergrad research assistants and will continue to work with them, I wanted to see what else may be available.

Have a look at http://www.getafreelancer.com

Doesn’t Northwestern have undergraduates? You’re not asking them to do any interpretation, so they aren’t really “coding.” Why “outsource”?

As has been suggested take care in setting up your data entry form, whatever way you do it (asp, excel template, etc) its good to think about the terms you use being as simple and generic as possible as the person usually that will do most of the work isnt likely to be highly skilled or have niche knowledge or they wont be doing this job. Especially consider fields that need to be filled in where there is some level of judgement about the result, and try to either eliminate or clarify them. And of course try to minimise the free text fields in the form except where absolutely necessary, the entry should be from a list (or be numeric) wherever possible, or you are likely to end up with lots of variants of the same term.

After that you have to think about quality – and this obviously depends on how critical accuracy is for the task, the simplest way being to get a third party (or yourself) to check a sample of the data to estimate the level of accuracy, or the other extreme is to find a way to uniquely identify all rows of data that would be entered from the videos and then get the entire list done twice (by two completely unrelated people/organisations), and then have someone resolve all rows with discrepancies between the two entered lists.

I am sure there are plenty of places to find people to do this sort of work, dont know any offhand as I all the companies I work with have their own internal staff to do it.

I’m sure that this has been considered, but I’ll mention anyway that more than one annotator is a good thing to have if there are any judgment calls to be made.

Finally, if I were doing this, I’d advertise for undergraduates, at a rate comparable to what work study students get.