We have a number of small projects that can be tackled from home, with assistance from other members. If you would like more information about how to help or if you have material to contribute, please send us an email.
Transcription of letters, wills and the Jackson Papers
We have many handwritten letters, wills and other legal documents that need deciphering. When transcribed, they become searchable and we can publish especially interesting ones in our journals. Deciphering the words is like a puzzle that sometimes reveals stories of people, relationships and their circumstances.
Contact us for documents that are waiting for transcription or tackle a few from your own family.
Digitisation of old articles
The oldest HAFS journals and newsletters have been saved in an PDF format that is not searchable. This means they don’t appear in website search results and nor do Google and other search engines find them. Unfortunately, the original Word documents and photos have been lost, so we’ve scanned them through an OCR (optical character recognition) software package. This has produced text files with quite a few errors in them and loss of formatting.
Contact Davina if you would like to help fixing these files.
Posting journal and newsletter articles separately on the website
Even though most of our journal and newsletter PDF files are loaded on our website and are in a searchable PDF format, they’re not easy for the user to access. The user has to go to the post that has the PDF attached, open the PDF and do a second search to find the relevant text.
If we load the text and images of an article into a post on our website, the article will appear in search results and can be accessed with one click. The article will be indexed more effectively by our website search engine and by the external search engines like Google and Bing because the text isn’t buried in a file and the post can be categorised and tagged. We can also link related articles and put links in tables of contents.
This project needs someone to copy and paste the text from the PDF or from a scanned file into a WordPress post or a Word document, make corrections and adjust formatting, categorise and tag the post, and see if it relates to other articles on our website.
These last two projects help us “surface” the work done years ago, so other people can find and use it in their research online.