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Making History
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Participate in enhancing access to collections covering 400 years of Virginia history, people, and culture. From peace to wartime, wedding announcements to world—changing events, court records to letters home, there is something for everyone. Help us tell the story of all Virginians—the famous, the infamous and even the anonymous—and join us in Making History.
Volunteer with Us!
Volunteers will need to create an account on the crowdsourcing platforms we use in order to participate: From The Page, Virginia Chronicle, and Zooniverse. You are welcome to volunteer independently. For more hands-on instruction, sign up for one of our bimonthly Transcribe-a-thons hosted both virtually and in-person at the Library of Virginia. Learn how to earn certified volunteer hours, either virtually or in-person.
LEARN MOREProjects
Our Making History crowdsourcing projects have four different types of activities: identification, indexing, OCR text correction, and transcription. You may wish to try several different collections and activities. Depending on your skills and preferences, you may have more success with one over another. Select the one that you enjoy the most!
Transcribe: Coroners' Inquisitions
Coroners’ Inquisitions contain investigations into the deaths of individuals who died by a sudden, violent, unnatural or suspicious manner, or died without medical attendance. Transcribe these historical documents.
Transcribe: Governors' Letters Received, 1781
Letters and other documents received in the Governor’s Office from 1776 to 1784, which provide a detailed picture of Virginia government during and immediately after the Revolutionary War. Transcribe these historical documents.
Index: World War II Separation Notices
The WWII Separation Notices Collection documents demographics, civilian life, and military service history for more than 250,000 veterans from across the state. Enter information from these forms into corresponding blanks.
Text Correction: Virginia Chronicle
OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a process in which software recognizes the shapes of letters and translates them into searchable text. Help improve the accuracy of OCR text by comparing it against the original historical newspaper and making additions and corrections.
Identify: WWII Separation Notices
This identification process involves viewing documents and selecting the matching image. For the WWII Project, this process helps to sort the different forms into separate groups for indexing to accurately gather all the information and data.
Tips & Tricks
Learn how to transcribe and index as part of the Making History crowdsourcing program. Whether you are just beginning to examine historical documents or have lots of experience, look here for help! Name abbreviations, legal terms and abbreviations, and lots more guidance await.
LEARN MORE
2025 Survey Open!
The Library of Virginia receives funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to support our crowdsourcing programs, including our transcribe-a-thons and collections available on From the Page. Please share your thoughts about the Making History project and programming in this brief survey.
TELL USMaking History Staff
Contact the Making History team at makinghistory@virginiamemory.com or select a specific team member below.
Kelley Ewing,
Senior Project Cataloger, Virginia Newspaper Project
804-692-3614
Lauren Caravati,
Digital Collection Specialist, WWII Separation Notices
lauren.caravati@lva.virginia.gov
804-692-3713
Kathy Jordan,
Director, Digital Initiatives & Web Presence
804-692-3913
Many additional staff at the Library contribute to our crowdsourcing projects through their ongoing work of processing, cataloging, digitization, and reviewing transcriptions submitted by the public.
About Making History
Project Background
Making History: Transcribe launched in August 2014 in an experiment to test if the public wanted to help transcribe historical documents, the accuracy of the resulting transcriptions, and how this might fit into our digital collections workflow. We initially used collections which had previously been scanned and had public appeal. The Civil War Sesquicentennial Legacy Collection was one of the largest collections we worked on during that first year. Documents from Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative, related to free and enslaved Black Virginians prior to the Civil War, were transcribed by volunteers seeking their ancestors or to uncover hidden histories.
Each transcribed page makes it possible for that particular archival item to be found through full-text searching in the LVA catalog and to be read by those who cannot decipher the handwritten version. Through our bimonthly transcribe-a-thons, we have connected and worked with many wonderful volunteers on collections ranging from WWII correspondence, to Chancery Court cases, to the papers of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia.
Technology
Our original Making History: Transcribe crowdsourcing platform was built in Omeka, using the Scripto plug-in and MediaWiki account system. This combination of opensource software worked well for eight years, but advances in the field and the limitations of the technology pushed us to try new options. As the official archives for the Commonwealth of Virginia, we hold many government records that are organized as forms or spreadsheets - formats that Omeka could not easily handle. Advances in transcription software now allow for greater flexibility, accommodating both structured forms as well as full text documents, like letters. Newer software options also provide easier account systems and more user-friendly and secure transcription interfaces.
For these reasons we upgraded our transcription platform by partnering with From The Page, a hosted transcription solution used by many other cultural institutions. Between 2018 and 2022, we used From The Page for collections of structured content, such as the World War I Questionnaires. In 2020-21, Library of Virginia staff worked with other Council of State Archives members to enhance From the Page with its creators and developers, Ben and Sara Brumfield. New developments included spreadsheet indexing for records such as ledgers and quality assurance tools, such as a reviewer role and review dashboard with quality sampling. We transferred all our transcription projects to From the Page in April 2022.
Partners and Funding
Making History: Transcribe is funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The Virginia Untold project is made possible through a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) grant. NHPRC provides advice and recommendations for the National Archives grants program. Previous funding was contributed by Dominion Virginia Power.
Traveling Transcribe-a-thons
Library of Virginia staff are delighted to partner with local organizations to bring a transcribe-a-thon to your community! Contact us to schedule an event with your Virginia public library, historical society, and high school or college class. Private transcribe-a-thons can also be scheduled, either virtually or in-person, for groups of more than twelve volunteers. Availability is based on staff capacity.
CONTACT US