UpFront with NGS: Citizen Archivist Project

Showing posts with label Citizen Archivist Project. Show all posts

21 March 2016

Transcribing -- a great way to celebrate Sunshine Week and you can do it year round!

The NARA Citizen Archivist initiative celebrated it by having transcription missions ...

Every transcription helps "unlock" the information and helps open government records. Each day of this week-long event we’ll release a mission based on an historical era. Our goal is to transcribe 2,000 pages this week. Transcriptions created by Citizen Archivists will enhance searches in our catalog and the transcriptions will be added to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.

· Sunday, March 13 –

o Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

o Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

· Monday March 14 – Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

· Tuesday, March 15 - The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

· Wednesday, March 16 – The Emergence of Modern American (1890-1930)

· Thursday, March 17 – The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945)

· Friday, March 18 - Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

· Saturday, March 19 - Contemporary United States (1968-Present)

I wonder how successful they were.

Did you transcribe something last week for a genealogical or historical society, library, archive or repository?

Every document transcribed is one that becomes “open” to researchers to use!

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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17 July 2015

One Person Can Do So Much! Virtual Volunteering (NARA)

We sometimes wonder can one person really make a difference. I know that my belief is yes!

This post on The National Archives NARATIONS blog, Virtual Volunteering, Retirement Project 2.0, seems to support my belief –

Recently I met Alex Smith through an email he sent to catalog@nara.gov. Through our correspondence I learned that he began transcribing our records as a retirement project. I was really interested in transcription through the eyes of a Citizen Archivist and Mr. Smith was kind enough to answer my questions.

If you would like to become a Citizen Archivist and tag, transcribe, subtitle or upload and share visit http://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/

This short blog post gives you the personal perspective of one volunteer and why he gravitated to the Citizen Archivist project and how he’s been so successful with it. Flexibility over when to work on items, from where to work on items, what items to work on, and the subject matter of the worked on items are just a few of what “hooked” Alex Smith.

I know that our local genealogy societies, while not using a spiffy interface like the Citizen Archivist project, have made use of PDF Files, cloud storage, and other techniques to make it incredibly easy for non-local members to help abstract or transcribe documents.

Do you know a very successful Virtual Volunteer?

What project(s) have they worked on?

What have you found the benefits of Virtual Volunteering to Be?

Any tips for those looking to dive into Virtual Volunteering?

Editor’s Note: Related articles ...

+ NARA Citizen Archivist Dashboard Live! (2012)

+ Smithsonian + Crowdsourcing Digitization = Lots of really neat stuff available to us! (2013)

+ Crowdsourcing -- making recently unimaginable amounts of information available to us at our finger tips! (2014)

+ FamilySearch Announces International Indexing Challenge -- a crowdsourcing effort of benefit to all genealogists and family historians (2014)

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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04 April 2014

New Revolutionary War Records -- Congressional claims files -- Citizen Archivist Project

We love learning about records that are newly available to a broad audience, especially if they are records typically under-utilized due to their previous obscurity!

Such is the case with Congressional Claims.

The immediate purpose of the [Citizen Archivist Project] work is two-fold: first, to provide box level descriptions of claims made to Congress by participants in the Revolutionary War, and their heirs or assigns; and second, to introduce students of history, library and/or archival science to the user experience as researchers. To that end, we have assigned to our student interns the work to produce box-lists of the contents of Congressional claims files papers. The interns have to determine from the limited finding-aides that already exist, what papers to request for a particular committee, like the Committee on Revolutionary Pensions, or the Committee on Military Affairs, etc. These committee papers, petitions and memorials are requested from the legislative archivists and each document is reviewed. A synopsis is then made listing more-or-less the relevant data; including at the very least the names of claimants, dates, basic nature of the claim and page count.

Read this post, Archives Fair at the US National Archives, which talks about what has been done in these records for the 16^th Congress. Here is an example of two entries:

Ward, Jonathan, 4 January 1820

Report of the Committee on Pensions and Revolutionary Claims in the case of Jonathan Ward, son of Stephen Ward– pension not granted (1)

Ward, Samuel, 21January 1820

Report of the Committee on Pensions and Revolutionary Claims in the case of Samuel Ward– relief granted (1)

Here is a link to a list of claimants for the 17^th Congress – Project Update. I’m sure there are even more goodies available.

Want to become a Citizen Archivist? Check out the Citizen Archivist Dashboard. We wrote about this project as it went live over two years ago. NARA Citizen Archivist Dashboard Live!

Want to keep upon the news from this exciting project? If so, consider “liking” its Facebook page.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Follow NGS via Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com