How can I get information about my father’s service in World War II? Where can I find records about my grandfather’s work for the Civilian Conservation Corps? Is there a list of official postmasters for local offices somewhere? These are all examples of questions recently asked and answered on the National Archives and Records Administration’s History Hub.
Source: Naomi Lieberman, AHA Today, April 26, 2016, http://blog.historians.org/2016/04/crowdsourcing-historical-and-archival-information-with-...
The 6-month pilot will end in May 2016.
2 Replies
Dominique Daniel
History Hub is a useful tool in these days of work from home -- "A support community managed by the National Archives for researchers, citizen historians, archival professionals, and open government advocates," "a crowdsourcing platform ... a place to ask questions, share information, work together, and find people based on their experience and interests. " (About History Hub)
Ryan W. Noyes
"Crowdsourcing" might be misleading to those who associate the term with fundraising. OP's article, posted in 2016, refers to a NARA initiative that engages the general public to help link data across record groups, primarily through tagging but also through other indexing initiatives going on. FamilySearch.org, which bills itself as the "largest collection of genealogical and historical records in the world" (https://bit.ly/2SjVRZA) does the exact same thing, though I presume with an enormously larger group of volunteers participating in this sort of thing.
The purpose of my comment was just to say that for the past few years, I've noticed that HistoryHub is actually a much faster mechanism to receive a response, from NARA staff, on record-specific questions. To the best of my knowledge, they don't even advertise this on their website. Instead, a generic email address is offered -- which works, but takes much longer to get a response.