Elizabeth Weise at USA Today writes about a worthy cause (archived):
If you can read cursive, the National Archives would like a word.
Or a few million. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents need transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority from the Revolutionary War era are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C. She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they’re looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.
Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census. […] To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. “There’s no application,” she said. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”
So there you are; if you have the increasingly rare skill required (insert rant here) as well as the time and temperament, go for it. (Thanks, Nick!)
And speaking of archives, check out Preservation of Osor’s rare book collection through digitisation (EAP1517):
The target material is the surviving private collection of uniquely rare books in the traditional Mongolian script held by Mr. Bat-Ochir Osor, who was one of the nation’s prominent educators and Mongolian language promoters of mid 20th century modern Mongolia.
His collection comprises exceptionally rare books printed in the traditional Mongolian script in the 1920s through to the 1940s, before Mongolia was forcefully shifted to Russian Cyrillic in the 1940s.
Thanks, Trevor!
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