Some 5,000 volunteers have signed up for the Citizen Archivist program, and you can be #5,001, if you hurry.
The deal is, our National Archives - the nation's dusty file cabinet - is bulging with old letters, deeds, wills, and other ephemera...papers that could yield tons of information valuable to historians and casual browsers alike, except...
There weren't typewriters available for Josiah Goodpasture as he fought Ye Olde Revolutionarye Warre; everything was written in pen. And not a handy Bic Stic, oh no. They plucked feathers 🪶 and made a point of turning them into ink pens.
And now, in an era when kids can only read a digital clock and don't even learn to write in, let alone read, cursive, the only chance to get these ancient documents put into readable form is to have Citizen Archivists help "unlock history" for the edification of the scholars of today and tomorrow.
The Nat'l Archives digitizes tens of millions of old pages, using artificial intelligence, real intelligence, and a gizmo called an optical character recognition device to turn the words of 1776 into the preserved text images of 2025.
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| Uhhh...what, now? |
Interested? Just go to secure.gov.login and follow a techno-trail that Josiah and his friends never got to see.
“There’s no application,” Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives, tells USA Today’s Elizabeth Weise. “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.”
Josiah would fairly beam with joy if some modern people could see his original payroll records from so long ago.
And archivists who excel at online translation will be given a chance to help me read my handwritten grocery list every week. Does that say "a lb. of butter" or "a leg of mutton"?
I need to know.
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