Browse Projects
North Carolina Field Offices, Offices of Staff Officers, Surgeon, Letters Sent, Volume 1, June–Oct. 1866
The Bureau of Refugees, Freemen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Series 3.4: Offices of Staff Officers: Surgeon. Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the experiences of formerly enslaved men and women in North Carolina during the Reconstruction Era. Have questions about how to transcribe tables in these documents? View special directions here.
USNM - Curators Annual Reports - Department of Fishes: Annual Report, 1889-1890
You know that feeling of relief when you clear your email inbox? Well it must have felt ten times better for honorary curator of the Department of Fishes Tarleton H. Bean after he cleaned out his overcrowded collections space. To make room, Bean and his team sent duplicates of specimens to other institutions, including the Boston Society of Natural History, and disposed of “worthless material.” But even with more space, Bean remained dissatisfied. In his annual report, he complained of the “foul and damp conditions of the basement,” where the specimens were stored. Dive in with a team of volunpeers to transcribe the progress made and challenges faced by the small (but mighty) group in 1889-90.
The Garden Club of America Collection - Alice Lockwood's Lecture American Gardens of the Southern States
What do the gardens of Mount Vernon, Middleton Place, and the University of Virginia have in common? They are all featured in Alice Lockwood’s 1935 lecture titled “Southern Gardens” which describes historic gardens of Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana in detail. Each garden mentioned corresponds to a hand-painted glass lantern slide in The Garden Club of America Collection at the Archives of American Gardens. Help us reconstruct this traveling garden history lecture! Funding for the digitization of Lockwood's lecture, & its inclusion into the Transcription Center, was provided by the Smithsonian Women's Committee.
Proceedings of the Board of Regents Meeting held on January 30, 1989
Philatelists, rejoice! In this Board of Regents report, the group discussed and voted on plans to establish the National Postal Museum in cooperation with the U.S. Postal Service. The National Philatelic Collection was established at the Smithsonian in 1886. It was housed at the U.S. National Museum, and, in 1964, the collection was moved to the National Museum of American History. By 1989, it was apparent that the growing collection required more space of its own for exhibitions and storage and expanded resources for the library and reference staff. Join a group of volunpeers in transcribing early discussions about the now-twenty-five-year-old museum.
Apollo 11 Launch Director's Loop (Reel 3 of 3), July 16, 1969
Join us in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 by transcribing sound recordings from the landmark event. Part of the National Air and Space Museum's Archives' United States Space Program Oral History Collection [Kapp], this set of recordings related to the Apollo 11 mission include crew press conferences, loops of audio from the launch director, the flight director, and the Public Affairs Office, and the reaction to the moon landing in the press room of the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, Texas. Every TC Sound segment transcribed helps make the history of Apollo 11 and the U.S. Space Program more accessible. Please view the instructions for transcribing audio collections before beginning and please **NOTE** many of these recordings are difficult to hear and contain multiple interruptions and silences.
North Carolina Field Offices, Subordinate Field Offices: Asheville, Letter Sent, Volume 1 (236), May—July 1866
The Bureau of Refugees, Freemen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Series 4.1: Subordinate Field Offices: Asheville (Agent). Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the experiences of formerly enslaved men and women in North Carolina during the Reconstruction Era. Have questions about how to transcribe tables in these documents? View special directions here.
North Carolina Field Offices, Offices of Staff Officers, Surgeon, Letters Sent, Volume 2, Oct. 1866–Apr. 1867
The Bureau of Refugees, Freemen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Series 3.4: Offices of Staff Officers: Surgeon. Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the experiences of formerly enslaved men and women in North Carolina during the Reconstruction Era. Have questions about how to transcribe tables in these documents? View special directions here.
North Carolina Field Offices, Subordinate Field Offices: Asheville, Endorsements, Volume (66), Aug. 1867–Oct. 1868
The Bureau of Refugees, Freemen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Series 4.1: Subordinate Field Offices: Asheville (Agent). Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the experiences of formerly enslaved men and women in North Carolina during the Reconstruction Era. Have questions about how to transcribe tables in these documents? View special directions here.
William Jones World War II Scrapbook
William Jones was an aerial photographer in the Army Air Corps during World War II. During the occupation of Japan, Jones photographed the atomic bomb damage of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki at low altitude. After his discharge he continued in his photography career, owning and operating a studio, Jones Photos, in Columbia City, Indiana, for over 43 years. PLEASE NOTE: for the maps, images, and photographs in this collection, please simply transcribe words, captions and annotations. Descriptions of the images, photographs, and maps are not required. If you choose to add descriptions, please place them in the notes field with brackets [[image description]] man in hat smiling [[/image description]] etc.
William Ockleford Oldman Archive Research Materials - Sales Register: Pistols, 1914-1916
Help us transcribe "Sales Register: Pistols, 1914-1916" from the William Ockleford Oldman Archive research materials! For instructions on how to transcribe this material, please view the project instructions page here . The William Ockleford Oldman Archive research materials are comprised of digital surrogates of the business records of Oldman held by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. These records include detailed information about his purchases and sales of objects including names of original sources for objects he acquired and sold. Since this provenance information is critically important to the documentation of NMAI’s collections, NMAI and Te Papa have begun a collaborative research project to make the Oldman materials available to the public for research and scholarship. William Ockleford Oldman (1879 – 1949) was a British collector and dealer of ethnographic art and European arms and armour. His business W.O. Oldman, Ethnographical Specimens, London was active between the late 1890s and 1913. Oldman purchased items from various sources including from auctions, directly from other collectors and dealers and also from many small British museums and historic houses. He held regular auctions to sell items and also reserved items for possible sale to particular private collectors, scholars, and heritage institutions including the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, NMAI’s predecessor institution. Ethnographic specimens with a provenance to Oldman’s business can now be found in various public institutions around the world including the National Museum of the American Indian.
