Small town history, big city archives. The love and passion for preserving historical information never fades. Home News Here out of Massachusetts brought this interesting information to us in their article, “Citizen archivist program.”

The National Archives in Washington, D.C. is offering a unique opportunity to contribute to preserving our history and our legacy. Citizens are invited to participate in archiving from the comfort of their own home, office, or anywhere they can access the internet. The mechanism now exists to help transcribe one of the billions of documents on file at the National Ar­chives in Washington, D.C. and create access to information at a never before seen scope.

Through the citizen archivist program, volunteers view documents, re-type them, and then tag key words in the document to make them accessible via the National Archives search engine. These virtual volunteers are key to making as many documents as possible available to the public and by cataloging their metadata, improving search results for users.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.