On August 30, 2020, Raritan Valley Branch hosted a branch meeting to introduce a new online volunteer project – Citizen Archivist Volunteer Project, which is based on a program launched by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in 2010. With more than 12 billion pages of paper records alone, National Archives offers valuable resources of historical documents. At the same time, the vast number of documents makes it impossible for users to find any information without the documents being organized, which needs tremendous manpower to accomplish. The Citizen Archivist program is NARA’s crowdsourcing initiative to engage the public in the effort to make the documents easier to find online. During the branch Zoom meeting, branch leaders Benjamin, Tarun, and Amy explained the purpose of the project, the procedures on setting up an account, and specifically how to transcribe documents. A step-by-step demonstration was also provided to walk the volunteers through the project. Volunteers couldn’t wait to start contributing to the nationwide effort in preserving/digitizing historical documents.
Meeting hosts: Benjamin Hong (30 mins), Tarun Sivakumar (30 mins), Amy Xu (30 mins)
