Last week, the Archivist of the United States, David Ferrerrio, gave a talk at the annual conference of the U.S. National Genealogical Society, held in Charleston, South Carolina. I was fortunate enough to be in the audience and listened to the Archivist speak about a number of topics. My notes are available at http://goo.gl/7WLoo.
In my notes, I wrote:
In my notes, I wrote:
David Ferrerrio invites everyone to become citizen-archivists to become familiar with specific records of interest and to contribute insights and even lists of names on various documents. With NARA's limited resources, it is impossible for the staff members to index records. However, interested citizen-archivists could perform those tasks for record sets in which they are interested.
Today, David Ferrerrio continued to describe his vision of citizen-archivists by writing about it in his own blog. He wrote:
At the National Archives, we’re always trying to think of new ways to make our historical records more accessible to the public. We have only a small fraction of our 10 billion records online, so it’s clear we’ve got to get creative.
It’s vital that we learn how other institutions address this challenge. One approach we’re seeing is for institutions to engage citizens in crowdsourcing or microvolunteering projects. These projects leverage the enthusiasm and willingness of online volunteers to transcribe or geotag historical records online.
Yesterday, we hosted a public program in the McGowan Theater called “Are You In? Citizen Archivists, Crowdsourcing, and Open Government. We heard about three innovative projects:
- the World Archives Project (http://community.ancestry.com/wap/download_ie.aspx) from Ancestry.com,
- the Map Warper Project (http://maps.nypl.org/warper/) from the New York Public Library, and
- the North American Bird Phenology Program (http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bpp/) from the U.S. Geological Survey
He then posted a link to a video of the full program. You can read David Ferrerrio's blog entry at http://blogs.archives.gov/aotus/?p=2938 and watch the video at http://youtu.be/AAT4jdE0qiU or click on the image below:
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