You Can be Part of Saving Ohio's History! - Susan Dress

Have you checked out the resources available to you on our website, under Online Resources? Check out Local History online for information about our community and state. There you’ll find links to the Bataan Death March history, senior class photos for Danbury Twp, and digitized yearbooks for Port Clinton High school; digitized issues of the Toledo Blade from 1869-2009; Old Stories, New Lessons, a collaborative project of Danbury Local Schools, Otterbein Marblehead, and the Marblehead Peninsula Branch Library; and a link to the Ohio Memory Project. And that last one is where your part can come in to play.

Ohio Memory is a “collaborative statewide digital library program of the Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio.” Ohio Memory contains over 1,600,000 digital images and they need the help of volunteer transcribers to make the documents easier to search and discover online. Documents needing work may include both handwritten and typed materials. Seniors are really needed for help with handwritten items, because apparently reading and writing cursive is a dying art.

Click on Ohio Memory Project from the Local History page: then click on Transcribe! to see what items are available and to read the transcription instructions. I started with Toledoans in WWII and Korea: a collection of newspaper clippings selected for their mention of local service members. These items have been scanned with OCR when added to the collection, but OCR text quality can vary. Your input is used to improve the usability of the documents. I did have questions not answered by the instructions, so I used the contact link at the bottom of the page and received a quick response with a detailed answer, including examples. I’ve looked at but haven’t tried working on any of the handwritten documents yet but hope to work my way up to them.

If you try this, and get bitten by the ‘transcription’ bug, there are other opportunities beyond Ohio. The Library of Congress started a program in 2018, using volunteers who have so far transcribed 55,000 pages. Volunteers are currently working on about 50,000 pages from the archives of five leaders of the fight for women’s right to vote.

The National Archives has created a Citizen Archivists program, to help digitize millions of pages, adding transcriptions, tags, and comments. Current missions include transcribing captions on WWI photos and statements and speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Smithsonian [Museum] Transcription Center has had over 14,000 volunteers since the program started in 2013, averaging 150 a week. 511,000 pages have been completed, with millions remaining. You can also transcribe historical audio with time-stamped captions, providing access to people unable to hear the sound versions.

You can find links to these programs in this article from AARP.org