Help out historians by volunteering to transcribe old documents online. Here are some fun projects to work on.
There are tons of libraries, institutions, archives, and historical societies out there that have gobs and gobs of documents, letters, data logs, and basically anything written. To fully digitize all this handwritten information, they're asking for help from volunteers to transcribe the pages.
They've already taken photographs or scans of the pages; all you need to do is look at the image and type out what you see written there. That way, the information can be made searchable.
Here are a few really interesting projects from organizations asking for help transcribing. If you think you can read old-timey handwriting and have an hour or two to spare, help out!
Help the University of Texas with its collection of Texan historical documents.
Letters, land claims, sermons, war records, slave sale receipts, advertisements, jail records, and more and need transcription. This is one of the more fun ones, with a wide variety of things that need to be transcribed, and they can be easily sorted by expertise level.
Uncover the history of the pioneer women of Iowa through their diaries and letters.
The University of Iowa's DIY History project includes a lovely collection of women's letters, diaries, and other personal papers from the 1800s–1900s. If you ever wanted to read someone's diary, now you can actually do it for a good cause.
Council Bluffs Public Library / Via Flickr: cbpl
Love shipwrecks? Help catalog the manifests of shipwrecks of the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes was (and is!) a major shipping route with tons of wrecked ships. Researchers need help transcribing a mix of newspapers, handwritten insurance records, and more shipping records. A niche undertaking, sure — but a fascinating project.
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