Dear List,
I am posting the item below because I think that the strategies being employed by the University of Portsmouth and the NRM may be of use and interest to colleagues in other archives.
Those of you who are on the Archives and Artefacts Study Network mailing list will already have seen it, so apologies for any cross posting.
Kind regards
Keith
Using crowd-sourcing to make records more accessible
A new project is opening up difficult-to-access documents, providing insight into the working lives and accidents of railway employees around the time of the First World War.
The ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project is a joint initiative of the University of Portsmouth and National Railway Museum (NRM), involving a team of volunteers from the NRM who went through nearly 4,000 worker accident reports written between 1911 and 1915. These reports are currently only generally accessible in hardcopy, meaning that many people who would be interested in them simply don’t know they exist. The project will help to change this, as well as demonstrating the power of crowd-sourcing for other arts and humanities ‘citizen science’ projects.
The volunteers have extracted key information about the accidents (who was involved, what happened, and so on) and entered it in a standardised and easily searchable spreadsheet, now freely available on the project website (www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk). This spreadsheet contains a significant level of detail, and will help raise awareness of the full reports, as well as answer questions about the nature of railway work, the types of people involved and the accidents railway employees incurred. The blog (on the website) is regularly updated with example cases, and the website contains a host of other useful resources.
We expect benefits from this project for museums and archives (starting with the NRM) by unlocking holdings that are currently uncatalogued, allowing institutions both to answer queries from researchers and making holdings more accessible, and to use the stories contained within their records in future exhibitions and content. Other beneficiaries will include academic and enthusiast researchers, family historians and the current rail industry.
It is hoped that future development of the work will extend the timeframe and bring in further worker accident records held at the NRM, as well as records from the National Archives and Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. Your feedback on the current project will be invaluable in developing these next steps and is eagerly sought – do please explore this resource and let us know what you make of it!
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