Transcribe with the Staten Island Museum
This online volunteer program invites community members to copy the text of historical documents into a more readable and searchable format. The program will begin with records digitized under the Access, Collaboration, and Equity in Genealogy Initiative (ACEGen). The Staten Island Museum needs your help to make collections about local history more accessible to the public.
In February 2022, the Museum launched its first crowdsourced transcription project: Black History Month Transcribe-a-thon.
ACEGen is a partnership among the Richard B. Dickenson Chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (SIAAHGS) and Frederick Douglass Memorial Park to digitize burial records dating back to the cemetery’s founding in the 1930s. ACEGen will also make city directories from the museum’s collection directly accessible to the public online and pilot digitizing key collections of records from communities that have been under-represented in the public record.
Records digitized by ACEGen are currently available on Internet Archive. However, newly digitized handwritten records will need transcription to become more easily readable, searchable, and accessible. We are looking for volunteers to help with this important work.
The initiative is supported with generous funding from New York Community Trust.
How to join the project
To become a volunteer transcriber:
- Watch the introductory video below.
- Sign up for a free account at fromthepage.com.
- Check out our Transcriber Resources.
Further Reading:
Visit Staten Island Museum’s page on Internet Archive.
Visit Frederick Douglass Memorial Park’s Page on Internet Archive.