You can transcribe or otherwise work with historical documents to help make them more searchable and accessible to researchers and others!
Interested in volunteering your time? Below are a few crowdsourcing projects to explore. Each project site has its own instructions for getting started, as well as project-specific guidelines/support/help to aid you in your work:
- By the People from the Library of Congress: Campaigns include “Letters to Lincoln,” “Suffrage: Women Fight for the Vote,” “Clara Barton: ‘Angel of the Battlefield,'” and many others. Visit the By the People Help Center to learn how to get started.
- Citizen Archivist from the National Archives: Missions include “Franklin D. Roosevelt Master Speech Files,” “American’s Scenic Byways” [photographs], “Amistad,” and more. Select “Register and Get Started” to begin.
- Freedom on the Move from Cornell University and others: “Rediscovering The Stories Of Self-Liberating People: A database of fugitives from American Slavery.” Help transcribe “runaway ads” and related ads posted in newspapers. From the Freedom on the Move homepage, click on “Crowdsource and Search Ads” to get started.
- Smithsonian Digital Volunteers from the Smithsonian Institution: A new featured project is “Letters from Paris: American Artists in Paris, 1860-1930.” For more projects, hover over “Projects” at the top right of the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center to browse by theme or museum/archive. Scroll down to the “Join Us!” section to get started.
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