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Historic Penmanship - Volunteer Opportunity
Zivio:
I just stumbled upon the Smithsonian's Digital Volunteer program where anyone over 14 years old may contribute to transcribing historical handwritten documents!
An excerpt from the project page states:
Become a Smithsonian Digital Volunteer and help us make historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible.
Since June of 2013, our community of “volunpeers” have collaboratively transcribed and reviewed over a million pages of field notes, diaries, ledgers, logbooks, currency proof sheets, photo albums, manuscripts, biodiversity specimen labels, and historic audio recordings ...
What I love about the opportunity, besides being able to see some great examples of handwritten historical documents and penmanship, is that there is really zero commitment to volunteering! You can just browse the projects for things of interest, or if you decide to help transcribe you are not committed to completing any particular document! Just save as much as you've done and start another one or quit.
I haven't yet done any work, but I did make an account and am looking through some projects. I was just too excited not to post this up! Here's a link to a video explaining the process and a couple of screenshots of what I've seen so far.
https://youtu.be/bpQFmtE9v6U
Zivio:
By the way, I did go into the site after registering and reading the instructions and contributed some transcriptions! It's fun and easy to do. I will not likely contribute huge amounts of time, but it is kind of addicting and an hour and a half went by with little notice. ;D
Erica McPhee:
This is AMAZING!!! What fun!! Thank you so much for sharing. I will definitely be taking a gander and probably transcribing. :)
Zivio:
PS: Some are challenging … and are restoring faith in my own penmanship. ;D
Zivio:
I just discovered that the National Archives has a similar Citizen Archivist program! I’m signing up to see the nature of the documents available there. Here is the link:
https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/get-started-transcribing
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