This time at home can be difficult. We miss our families, friends, and getting out and about. For those not working or working from home, the struggle to fill the hours with something other than cleaning or watching streaming documentaries about tigers is intense.
These projects from museums, archives, and libraries are looking for volunteers to help transcribe oral histories, tag photos with descriptions, index genealogical records, and more. These are great volunteer opportunities for teens, adults, and seniors – all you need is a computer and internet access.
Explore and transcribe the papers of leading suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna E. Dickinson, Lucy Stone, and Alice Stone Blackwell.
Transcribe and translate historic legal documents in Latin, Spanish, and Catalan.
The National Archives is looking for Citizen Archivists to tag, transcribe, and add comments to NARA’s records, making them accessible and searchable.
The Citizen Science Alliance operates the Zooniverse portal, where projects are unique and creative. Ever wanted to transcribe old weather reports from ships? There’s a project for that! Want to view photographs of preserved plant specimens and decipher typed and handwritten labels? There’s a project for that!
Help The New York Public Library fix computer-generated transcripts from hundreds of stories from the library's Community Oral History Project.
Become a Smithsonian Digital Volunteer and help them make historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible.
Assist Family Search with their indexing projects from all over the world.
[Photo credit: Trent Erwin on Unsplash]