The Dusty Bookshelf and the K-State English Department have partnered to put on what they are calling the Satellite Transcribe-athon, which is part of a nationwide effort to digitize about 16,000 documents related to the women’s-movement of the early 1900s.
The effort was launched by the Library of Congress earlier this year in honor the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which legalized voting for women in the United States.
The Dusty Bookshelf is acting as a location where volunteers can access instructions on how to participate through the Library of Congress website and gain tips from the occasional K-State English professor stopping by.
That was Sarah Wilson, the manager of The Dusty Bookshelf, who also says that while the handwriting can be difficult to decipher, it is fun to see the personalities of the authors come out through their writing.
There is also a need for volunteers to review documents that have already been transcribed in order to ensure accuracy.
The Dusty Bookshelf will be serving as a satellite site for this effort until Friday at 4 p.m., but volunteers can continue to transcribe and review documents at crowd.loc.gov.
Those volunteer in the Transcribe-athon at The Dusty Bookshelf can receive a pin fashioned to look like ones worn during the women’s-suffrage movement.
