Smithsonian Needs Your Help Reading their Collection

Photo Courtesy: Smithsonian

A few weeks ago the Smithsonian announced it's Digital Volunteers program.  This has been in the works for a while as the institution has taken high-resolution pictures of many important books in their collection.  This includes lab notebooks and field journals of Smithsonian scientist, as well as handwritten specimen cards and other scientific writings. Now that those works are digitized, the Smithsonian needs your help reading and transcribing what's in them.

It's like a personal behind-the-scenes tour of the collection.  Only with this tour you also make the discoveries!

Our sister site OpenScientist just did a full review and even has great directions for getting involved.  It really seems easy for most people; the toughest part is just reading some of the messy handwriting used by those early writers (now I understand why my own teachers used to stress handwriting so much!).  So if you have any interest I definitely recommend checking it out.