Help Us Unlock History During Citizen Archivist Service Week!

In the spirit of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, we’re launching a week-long citizen archivist challenge from January 15-19.

We invite you and your students to join us!

Help us unlock history by tagging and transcribing primary source documents in the National Archives Catalog. As you add tags or transcriptions to these records, those words are added to our catalog – improving search results. The added benefit is that we’re unlocking the sometimes difficult to read text for all to understand. By adding this metadata to our Catalog, it also becomes searchable in Google and other search engines, which helps to make our records more discoverable online. We like to say that as we tag and transcribe, we are unlocking history.

Together with our virtual volunteers, we can make the records of the National Archives more discoverable online. Our goal is to tag or transcribe 2,018 pages during Citizen Archivist Service Week. Can you and your students help us meet this challenge?

Get started by visiting the Citizen Archivist Dashboard beginning January 15. During that week, we’ll have lots of missions and featured records waiting to be transcribed. For our new volunteers, you’ll also find instructions on how to create an account and get started.

Encourage Service Week in your classroom!

A great way to get students involved is by playing the tagging game. It’s a head-to-head or team-versus-team challenge to list as many keywords (Tags) that describe or identify items in an image. After one minute of writing keywords, teams compare their lists and scores are awarded. Before moving on to the next image, the game host adds all the keywords as tags into the Catalog description.

You can find more information and resources for both tagging and transcription on our dashboard.

Stay in touch!

Send us a tweet @USNatArchives using the hashtag #CitizenArchivistServiceWeek to let us know what you’re working on and what you find in the records.

Follow us throughout the week to keep up with our progress. We’ll post updates on the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, and on social media.

We look forward to your contributions during our Week of Service – and always! Thank you for helping us unlock history for students and learners of all ages.