I do it a lot here anyway, but allow me a moment to get on my archivist soapbox because this is not only cool af but important too.
The US National Archives (and this may certainly apply to other countries but this post is about this specific institution) has a lot of material. And that may seem like an obvious statement, but what I mean to say here is that it has a lot of unprocessed material.
âProcessingâ, in the archive world, is the word we use to mean âorganizing the collection materials in a way that makes sense and describing the collection so people know whatâs thereâ. Essentially, processing a collection or material is what makes it accessible to researchers. Think about how you organize yourself or your space. Most of the time when we acquire material we get it exactly how the creator kept it, which is ranges from neat as a pin to literal garbage dump, but mostly falls into the middle area of somewhat organized but also not really. Processing gives the archivist âintellectual controlâ (we go through everything so we now know exactly whatâs in the collection) and gives researchers something to look at thatâs a lot more manageable.
But, like I said, the National Archives has a lot of material. Which at this point includes a massive backlog. So what they have done, with the advent of the internet, is turned to crowdsourcing. (Using a large group of volunteers over the internet to accomplish more than the few people who work for the archive can do, and/or using group knowledge and skills that they donât have to their advantage. Wikipedia or any fandom wiki is an example of crowdsourcing.) This is a long process, because anything they put up has to be digitized first, and that is not as easy as it sounds. I wonât rant here, but itâs time consuming, labor intensive, and in some cases not even feasible with the material.
Anyway, the National Archives crowdsources through a program that they call âcitizen archivistsâ. Itâs something thatâs free and obligationless, itâs totally voluntary and you do things like add tags to pictures, transcribe documents that are handwritten or otherwise not word-searchable, and add comments about things that are missing information or context.
The reason I bring this up is because they have divided the work into what they call âmissionsâ, basically just categories of material to work on. They have a new one thatâs just been made public (likely because they finally got the digitization completed) that is a large collection of pictures consisting of Native subjects, and they need help tagging them.
So if you feel antsy and need something to do or you feel down and you want something positive, consider helping out the National Archives. Because the work the citizen archivists do makes the materials more accessible to the public, and ultimately to any and all future researchers out there.Â
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