It was just over two years ago that DIY History reached its amazing 50,000-page transcription benchmark! This past week we achieved 75,000, and we’d like to take the opportunity to talk a little bit about the elements that have led to this amazing growth.

Available Collections

Since reaching 50,000 pages, six new collections have been added including Scholarship at Iowa, Museum of Natural History Egg Cards, Social Justice, the Van Allen Papers, Germans in Iowa, and most recently, the Keith-Albee Vaudeville notebooks. Each of these collections allows a glimpse into a certain moment in history from early 1900s managers’ reports on a wide array of entertainment to important documents detailing correspondences in Iowa during the Civil Rights era.

Outreach

Expanding across platforms like Twitter has helped us continually make these efforts more accessible, and has allowed for additional crowdsourcing opportunities in classrooms and at other institutions, like the Nova Scotia Archives.  Just this past fall, locally and in conjunction with a global transcribing effort, the UI’s Museum of Natural History partnered with WeDigBio for a week-long egg card transcription blitz. In short, these collections are getting to see the light of day in an exciting and participatory manner and we couldn’t be happier with the response.

The Community

Lastly, reaching this milestone wouldn’t be possible without the continued support of the wonderful community of volunteer transcriptionists who help to make these collections come to life by making them available and searchable for researchers and historians. So to them we say thank you, and we hope this sentiment will inspire others to help build the historical record!

The Team

DIY History is made possible by the wonderful team here at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, specifically by the Studio’s Senior Developer, Matthew Butler, and our Digital Scholarship & Collections Librarian, Mark Anderson.