For the past few months, I’ve been looking for a volunteer opportunity. Something that I feel connected with and where I can contribute an hour or more at a time.
A project that doesn’t require huge blocks of time.
In the past, I would volunteer at a local school library. But I haven’t done any in-person volunteering since before the Covid pandemic.
What I wanted was a virtual volunteer opportunity. And my goal was to find something local to my community or state.
Which is what I found when I discovered Picturing Michigan’s Past, a Zooniverse volunteer project at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
Given my background working at and volunteering at libraries since I was a teenager, I’m not surprised I found a research project at a library.
About Picturing Michigan’s Past
The Picturing Michigan’s Past project is focused on real-photo postcards in the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography, which consists of over 100,000 images.
According to the Picturing Michigan’s Past project description:
…more than half of the images (around 60,000) are real-photo postcards (RPPCs) depicting almost every aspect of life in every county in Michigan from the early 1900s to the late 1950s.
Which quickly captured my attention. I love learning more about Michigan’s history!
The project consists of two phases:
- Classification of postcard subjects
- Transcription of test from postcards: handwritten messages and addresses
With the contributions from volunteers, the first phase of the project has been completed.
But the second phase, text transcription, still needs volunteers.
And that’s what I’ve been working on.
Once the two phases are complete, library staff will compile and review results, and create a new collection for the postcards.
Which will be available to the public and searchable from the library website.
My Transcribing Experience
To make sure everyone understands the steps involved with transcription, the project has an online field guide.
With detailed transcription instructions and examples of what should and shouldn’t be transcribed.
It doesn’t take long to do the handwriting transcription. But it can be challenging reading the handwriting.
Thankfully, each postcard is transcribed multiple times. Transcribers are recommended to make their best guess and not worry if they make a mistake.
And we can mark text as “unclear” when we’re not sure what the text is.
A few things I’ve learned from the project:
- Prior to 1907, only the address could be written on the back of a postcard. So some people wrote messages on the front of postcards.
- Some postcards have two postmarks: one to indicate where the postcard was sent from and the second to indicate where the postcard was received
Wrapping Up
I’m excited about contributing to a project about Michigan and its history. It’s fun to see the postcard images, though there haven’t been any images of places so far that I’ve recognized.
I can’t wait to explore the project once it’s completed and made public.
