One way to uncover valuable information about people after they ’re move is to research through their boring old paperwork . The New York Public Library knows this , hasa lotof sure-enough paperwork , and is asking for the public ’s assistant in catalog it .
The taradiddle they ’re expect to tell are those of immigrant in nineteenth and early twentieth century New York . During that time , Emigrant Bank ( establish by members of the Irish Emigrant society ) was one of the gravid in the nation , and made respectable investments that greatly help the growth of the metropolis . To give you an idea of their reach , Emigrant Bank offer loan for things like the construction of St. Patrick ’s Cathedral and a public works project that finally became Central Park . Twenty years ago , the bank donate their large collection of archival disc to the NYPL , who microfilm them .
With “ Emigrant City , ” the NYPL train to digitize those material estate of the realm records and pull in data from the roughly6,400handwritten mortgage and bond certificate ledgers . When over , the information will be searchable and coordinate , and thus more useful to genealogists and historians who are concerned in the lives of immigrant families from a C ago .
In achieving such a big - scale end , the library needs help . They ’re asking voluntary to extract information from the records via high closure images . The tasks are divided intothree categories : marking , transcribingandverifying , which can be done independently of one another if , you acknowledge , marking happens to beyour thing . That chore involves identifying subject on a pageboy and drawing box around them , while transcribe is try out to decipher the telephone number and words in the box , and verifying is checking those written text for accuracy . The depository library ’s software runs an algorithm that look for understanding among transcriptions . When line uprise , verification user vote on which arrangement look most accurate .
The labor is a cool mode to bend those archival nerd muscularity and contribute to a collection that will attend to to summate to the complex story of one of the most storied city in the world .
