Preserving the Past
With today’s pace of change it feels like the future comes at us at warp speed. The mind boggling speed of life is enough to makes us want to slow down and appreciate where we’ve come from. Perhaps that explains the popularity of online history projects. Today, anyone can contribute to preserving memories— here are a few examples.
“Seeing” Old San Francisco
A 1906 fire in San Francisco led to mass destruction of the city’s structures. Now, a project is underway to revive a detailed set of maps drawn the year before the fire to recreate historic San Francisco. The maps have been scanned in high resolution, making them accessible from mobile phones so the public can help “geo-rectify” the maps. “It gives you context for the neighborhood you live in,” says one of the project’s founders. You can figure out where people worked and lived, where they had their beer, a hundred years ago.
Creating an Online Public Access system
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration wants to make its historic documents more searchable, so it is asking the public to participate in a program to tag documents in its online database. As users search the catalog, from George Washington to Mount Vernon, they are invited to tag any archival description, person, or organization name records with the keywords or labels that are personally meaningful.
Preserving War Documents
In commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, a U.S. University created an exhibit incorporating letters and diaries from three historic manuscript collections. As a part of this exhibit, the war documents were also scanned and made available online. Scanning the 3,011 pages of letters and diaries was an accomplishment but the university is asking for help with the transcription to make them more readable and searchable.
A larger-scale effort is taking place in Europe, where The First World War archive project is collecting family letters, photographs and keepsakes from the War to be digitised. Real-life roadshows have been hosted in Britain and Germany where people bring items to be digitized on the spot. In Germany alone, 15,000 items had been preserved, creating an enduring, highly-personalized Web archive of the war.
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