Opportunity: How to Help Librarians and Archivists From Your Living Room
If you’re cooped-up and curious, use your free time to decipher handwriting, tag images, and more. - resources reposted from Atlas Obscura
The Newberry wants help deciphering 140-year-old letters such as this one, written by a teacher named Anna Everett, who settled in her family’s home in Remsen, New York. THE NEWBERRY
repost from Atlas Obscura - written by JESSICA LEIGH HESTER
“IF TIME AT HOME HAS you missing life in the stacks or sifting through old papers in search of pieces of the past, fear not: You can do the same thing online. Slews of institutions are in the market for armchair archivists—volunteers who can generate knowledge by clicking through digitized resources, deciphering handwriting, tagging photos, and more.
Several institutions have already seen an uptick in digital detective work since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A transcription project at the Newberry, a research library in Chicago, has seen a surge in contributions: “In two weeks, we’ve received 62 percent of the traffic we typically see over the course of an entire year,” writes Alex Teller, the library’s director of communications, in an email. This past weekend, the By the People transcription project at the Library of Congress saw 5,000 more users than the previous weekend, says Lauren Algee, the team lead for the crowdsourced initiative.”
Follow this link to view Atlas Obscura’s article detailing digital collections initiatives in which you can be a participant, including the the Madam C.J. Walker materials from the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress’s By the People project, which needs help transcribing Rosa Parks’s papers, including her correspondence with her husband and mother.
Madam C. J. Walker was a entrepreneur and activist. BLUESY DAYE/PUBLIC DOMAIN
“I want you to understand that your first duty is to humanity. I want others to look at us and see that we care not just about ourselves but about others.”
— Madam C.J. Walker