Capital history 5: Volunteering to transcribe historical documents
Dear Readers
If you love history, you may want to volunteer to transcribe historical documents. These volunteer opportunities seem to have increased in recent years. This is a wonderful development because it has allowed historical resources, the raw materials of history, to be more easily discovered and used by everyone. For volunteers there is the satisfying experience of revealing the past one word at a time while contributing to some special history projects. Here are five transcribing opportunities that may suit you.
Become a Voluntrove
The National Library of Australia’s Trove has revolutionised Australian history research. It brings together billions of pieces of information from Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives. A huge part of its success is the army of voluntroves who work making Trove resources more accessible. Since 2011, thousands have contributed to Trove through a range of activities including text-correction, adding tags, and creating lists. To find out more about becoming a Voluntrove read here.
Become an Australian War Memorial Transcription Volunteer
Transcribe is an Australian War Memorial (AWM) initiative to provide greater access to the Memorial’s National Collection. The AWM holds a diverse collection of material relating to the Australian experience of war; and an archive holding extensive official and unofficial documents, diaries and papers. Transcribe includes transcription quests where the Transcribe community works together to transcribe the works of a specific author, time period, or common subject. For example, a current quest are the papers of Sir John Monash. Find out more about Transcribe here.
Join the arcHIVE community
The National Archives of Australia has also started an online arcHIVE transcription community to help describe the records of the Archive’s holdings, so they are more discoverable. Find out more about the arcHIVE community here.
State Library NSW Digital volunteering
The State Library NSW’s digital volunteering lets volunteers contribute to the enrichment of the library’s collections and at the same time delve deeper into the wonders of Australian cultural heritage and history. Volunteers can participate in a range of digital projects. For example, current projects include transcribing Miles Franklin diaries, Indigenous Languages and the harrowing stories of those involved in the 2003 Snowy Mountain bushfires. Find out more about the library’s Digital volunteering here.
DigiVol Online
The Australian Museum in collaboration with the Atlas of Living Australia started DigiVol in 2011. The program is dedicated to digitising the 21 million items in the Australian Museum collections, as well as providing other institutions with a platform to digitise their own collections. Online volunteers make the vital contributions of transcribing text from images of specimen labels, field notes and archival material that have been uploaded to the DigiVol website. Find out more about DigiVol here.
Are you aware of other digital volunteering opportunities? Or would you like to share your experiences if you are already a volunteer transcriber. Please contact me at mail@capitalhistoryhere.com if you have some thoughts to share.
Acknowledgement: Photo by Alessio Fiorentino on Unsplash.
Please share. Let’s get the past and present talking.
