Researchers rely on various sources to analyze, and when it comes to primary sources, sometimes the writing is beyond our modern style. To comprehend these records better, some people volunteer to help transcribe documents or even audio recordings to aid in deciphering unrecognizable words and numbers by putting them into modern print. My service-learning experience has allowed me to connect with the past, but more importantly, to help other people access these pieces of information.

       I spent my time this semester with the Smithsonian Digital Volunteer Project to add transcriptions to documents that are part of a larger collection. I worked on multiple projects, such as Project PHaEDRA - Mary L. Miller, the Mississippi Field Offices, and more. I contributed to the individual documents from the hundreds of pages that were part of the collections. The responsibilities I was granted were, first and foremost, to learn how to transcribe the documents because there are specific ways to notate formats like tables, blanks, and strikeouts. Inevitably, there will be mistakes; I was unsure of some words and had to leave a [[?]] for someone else to check. While the Smithsonian has different levels listed, starting from beginner to advanced, many of the incomplete projects were of higher levels, making them pretty intimidating to look at or review.

       Out of all of the projects that I could have completed, I chose this option as a way to focus on specific skills that work with documents. Transcribing the documents involved digital literacy, detail-oriented tasks, and research, which can transcend this term into my future career in history. Even though many of them were not the typical topics that I have learned thus far in my degree, like how people historically studied birds or the stars, but it made it that much more exciting to go beyond events and get a peak of what people were doing in their everyday lives that scholars might overlook.