Students as citizen archivists and scientists: The new community service?

It may not be the typical white glove or laboratory experience, but students of history and science can find multiple opportunities to volunteer as citizen archivists or citizen scientists in a few important crowdsourcing efforts.

The Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Smithsonian offer parts of their collections to be organized and made accessible by employing the services citizen volunteers.

1. The Library of Congress was an early adopter of archival crowdsourcing. In fact, in 2008, the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division began to recruit volunteers to improve the findability of thousands of photographs using its Flickr Commons to identify people, places and additional data. Additional adventures in crowdsourcing include the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s FixIt+ and Library of Congress Labs’ Beyond Words, which invite citizens to transcribe historic radio programs and to identify cartoons and photographs in the historic newspaper collections.

2. The National Archives Citizen Archivists Dashboard shares several Citizens Missions.  Current NARA transcribing and tagging missions involve documents relating to American Expeditionary combat forces in World War I, papers relating to Alger Hiss (accused of participating in a Communist espionage ring), records relating to former and last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Revolutionary War Prize Cases (relating to captured ships), Radium Girls (female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning while painting watch dials with luminescent paint in the early part of the 20th century), and American Scenic Byways (photographs of 150 All American Roads).

NARA’s Mary King recently announced a new social media project. NARA’s Facebook chatbot allows citizen archivists to interact with the Archives’ staff and to improve accessibility.To start interacting with the chatbot, click on the Send Message button on our Facebook page, and say “Hi!”