In a 1918 letter home from the front lines of World War I, a US Army soldier told his family, “Some day someone will tell the story as it should be told.” Nearly a century later, his eyewitness-to-history account has been transcribed for posterity through the efforts of a 21st-century army of citizen archivists.
The Citizen Archivist Dashboard is a crowdsourcing project of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Using a Web 2.0 toolkit, volunteers are helping NARA with the painstaking process of turning 10 billion pages of historical documents—many of them written in longhand—into searchable, digitized data that users can access online.
“It’s all about providing the greatest possible access to the records,” says Pamela Wright, chief innovation officer for NARA. “When people are looking for that needle in the 10-billion-straw haystack, we want to make sure they can find it.”
The dashboard went live at the end of 2011, and right away the public started using it with an enthusiasm that took NARA by surprise. “We started with 300 documents that needed to be transcribed, including 1,000 handwritten pages. Within two weeks, we ran out of documents,” Wright says. “Not only was everything transcribed, but the documents in languages other than English were translated. And the quality was good. We were stunned.”
Since then, citizen archivists have gone online to tag historic photographs, transcribe ship’s logs and old weather reports, and edit Wikipedia articles that cite National Archives sources. NARA continues to upload new “missions,” as the agency calls them, to keep volunteers engaged.
“This is all hugely important,” says Jackie Dooley, president of the Society of American Archivists. “No archive has enough staff to work at such a level of detail.” Professional archivists tend to work on collections “at more of an aggregate level,” she explains. “Being able to provide keyword searching of transcribed content greatly increases the level at which people can find relevant materials.”
Citizen archivists aren’t in it for the glory. For the most part, Wright says, “we don’t even know who they are.” From anecdotal information, she knows that their ranks include genealogists and military history buffs, as well as professional scholars.
“There are a lot of buffs out there,” Dooley says. “They have a personal passion for this material.” One of the best illustrations of the citizen archivist trend, she says, is the tremendous outpouring of volunteer time that has gone into Trove, a digital newspaper project that’s run by the National Library of Australia. Since that project launched in 2009, some 30,000 volunteers have corrected 40 million lines of scanned and digitized text.
Creators of the Citizen Archivist Dashboard selected its tools with an eye toward ease of use by nonprofessionals. The dashboard incorporates existing Web 2.0 tools, such as Flickr for photo sharing, along with tools designed just for this project. The transcription tool was developed in-house. When you click on an object to transcribe, two windows open. The top one displays the original document. On the bottom window, users enter their response to a straightforward question: “What do you see?” In a demonstration of the “wisdom of crowds” idea, users can improve quality by editing each other’s work.
“We wanted it to be simple enough for a high school student to use,” Wright explains. In fact, she hopes to find a way for students to earn service-learning credits for their contributions.
NARA, for its part, has earned not only an expanded social media following—its Tumblr site, called Today’s Document, has 100,000 followers—but also formal recognition. In 2012, the Citizen Archivist Initiative received the Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award from the Administration Conference of the United States.
Wright, the agency’s first innovation officer, plans to keep looking for opportunities to engage with the public. Those opportunities won’t all take place online. One idea in the pipeline is to create real-world innovation hubs where students with fluency in digital tools can work with older volunteers on archiving projects. Older volunteers, in return, might offer tips on a quickly vanishing skill: the ability to read cursive handwriting.
Read more stories by Suzie Boss.