DIY History (http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/) is a crowdsourced online volunteering project that comes from the Digital Library in the University of Iowa. The online volunteers for DIY History will transcribe the digital artifacts that are related to the history of Iowa. The goal is to make this information easy for people to search and learn more about the history.

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Volunteers are expected to transcribe and tag scanned documents letters, newspaper articles, and diaries from war time. They will also transcribe manuscripts that are related to the lives of the early residents of Iowa, social justice, cookbooks, recipes, and fanzines. These are just some of the things that volunteers can work on with this project. As long as you have internet connection and register for the site, you are able to volunteer here.

The benefits of volunteering for this organization is that you can be a part of making the history of Iowa more accessible for anyone who wants to read this information. You can be a part of this important mission and you may even learn some great information throughout this process as well. You can also be a part of preserving this history for the next generations.

There is no time commitment to work with this organization.

This project started out as an experiment by the University of Iowa, when they crowdsourced the Civil War Diaries and Letters Transcription Project. This was launched in 2011 to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In the first year, the volunteers have transcribed over 15,000 pages. This project started to expand as the volunteers got close to finishing these diaries and letters.

If you are interested in participating in this project or learning more about what this organization does, you can visit this page: http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/about-the-project.