Transcribing the Collection
Join our digital volunteer network on Zooniverse and help us transcribe documents. As a way to make our collection more accessible, this work will create additional resources and knowledge about Colorado history and will have significant impact for researchers throughout the world.
Out of the Archives
This project includes 10 sets of record-keeping ledgers for the archive collection. History Colorado has collected for over 140 years and holds millions of archive items including approximately 30,000 books, 3,000 maps, and other unique items and each has a corresponding entry in one of these ledgers. These ledgers date back to the early 1900s and are History Colorado's first records for the archive collections and contain information about when they came in, from whom, and other pertinent data. Help us transcribe each one of these ledgers so we can better preserve these ledgers and match the provenance to each item.
Be a Digital Volunteer!
Volunteer your skills virtually to make Colorado history available for all. Anyone can contribute to this project from their home computers by transcribing and adding keywords for History Colorado collections. We invite you to be our partner in making our collections more visible and more accessible.
- Register
- Click on the “Register” tab to create an account using the format "Firstname-Lastname" (if you’d prefer to volunteer anonymously you can skip this step). *Signing in allows you to participate in discussions and allows us to give you credit for your work.
- To track your volunteer hours please fill out this form for access to our volunteer portal.
- Sign-In
- If you already have an account, sign in with the username and password you created.
- Get Started!
- Click on the “Get Started” button to start volunteering!
- Be sure to read the Tutorial and the Field Guide first because it will help you get started.
It's as easy as 1 - 2 - 3! Thank you for helping make our collections available to the public!
FAQs
Do I have to register?
No, registration is not required but does help us to thank you and give you credit for your work. If you do not want to register, you can simply skip to the “get started” button.
What will happen to the transcriptions?
History Colorado staff will import the project information into the museum collections database (h-co.org/collections) and it becomes searchable.
Who should I contact for more information?
For information about volunteering at any one of our statewide History Colorado sites contact emily.dobish@state.co.us. For information about donating items and the collection contact curator@state.co.us.
Why do these documents need to be transcribed?
Modern technology, in particular Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which is the ability to convert images or scans into text, is not able to recognize older text or handwriting because the handwriting is unpredictable and not uniform or the text is faded or of poor quality. In order to be able to search the content of the documents, the handwriting needs to be transcribed.