The Boston Public Library needs help transcribing 40,000 anti-slavery documents from the 19th century

This is a pretty cool and historically important project from the Boston Public Library!

The Boston Public Library's Anti-Slavery collectionone of the largest and most important collections of abolitionist material in the United Statescontains roughly 40,000 pieces of correspondence, broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets, books, and memorabilia from the 1830s through the 1870s.

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We need your help to turn our collection of handwritten correspondence between anti-slavery activists in the 19th century into texts that can be more easily read and researched by students, teachers, historians, and big data applications.

It's not paid work, but if you're historically curious, they welcome volunteers to comb through their online archives to help digitize everything line-by-line. It looks like a pretty straight-forward process, although it doesn't work on mobile devices or tablets.

Anti-Slavery Manuscripts [Boston Public Library] Read the rest