Archives Outside

For people who love, use and manage archives

Harnessing the power of public participation

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has approximately 130 million items online and an estimated 110 billion pages of paper in their collection in total. In this video they discuss the way they are creatively exploring the use of public participation to help them meet the challenges of managing and making accessible such a large collection online.

The Citizen Archivist Dashboard is NARA’s new crowdsourcing tool for tagging, transcription, digitization of records, and more. Meredith Stewart demonstrates the various collaboration tools in the dashboard and discusses how the dashboard fits into the National Archives’ online strategy as part of Social Media Week DC.

Direct Link (In case video doesn’t embed)

Feeling inspired? Why not check out the Citizen Archivist Dashboard and start exploring.

Ahoy there! Oldweather.org uses Crowdsourcing to transcribe archives and support scientific and historical research

As part of an exciting new Crowdsourcing project Oldweather.org is asking members of the public to help transcribe information in the naval logbooks of Royal Navy warships from the WW1 era.