Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
If you can read cursive, the National Archives would like a word.
Or a few million. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents are in need of transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority of them are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Issacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington D.C.
She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they’re looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.
Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census.
“We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog,” Issacs said.
To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. “There’s no application,” she said. “You just pick a 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.” (continued)