BEFORE YOU START

Learn everything you need to know about participating in this project.

Learn the Ropes

RETURNING VOLUNTEERS

Choose cards to correct by subject or go random with a lucky dip.

Carry on Correcting

About the project

The Local Studies Collection of Sutherland Shire Libraries has an extensive historical subject index covering the period 1900 to 1985. For many years, Library staff have indexed local topics of interest from our local newspapers, Sutherland Shire Council meeting minutes and other local sources, including biographical material and obituaries, on index cards. These index cards have been scanned, with transcripts created by OCR (Optical Character Recognition), that is, computers have generated a text transcript from the card image. These transcripts need to be checked for accuracy and corrected where necessary.

What information is contained in the Index Cards?

Each index card contains one or more references to newspaper articles or council minutes; you might even find a council minute and a newspaper reference included on the same card. While the computer generation of transcripts (OCR) works quite well on typed cards, it only provides a single paragraph of text for each card. Sources, references and dates cannot be distinguished from the article title, which makes searching more difficult. There are also many handwritten cards and the OCR process does not work for handwritten text.

During this project volunteers checked the computer-generated transcripts of over 90,000 Index Card records. They corrected spelling and other errors, identified the references - the newspaper or council committee names, the dates and page numbers, etc. - and separated that information from the content of the card to create records that can be searched by subject, date and source.

The many thousands of hours of work from volunteers has unlocked the historical value of this collection; something that could not have been achieved without their help. Their efforts have made this information easier to access for researchers, genealogists, students and anyone looking for information about the history of the Sutherland Shire.

Library staff are now in the process of reviewing the updates made by volunteers and following up on records identified as incorrect or that have missing information. As a result, we are not looking to recruit new volunteers.