The General Files collection (Record Series 1802-04) highlights the voices of Seattle residents and City officials as they struggled to address issues facing a city experiencing enormous growth and change. The series includes some of our oldest records, covering the last quarter of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, and contains a wide range of documents, including petitions, claims, reports, contracts, bids, and other items relating to the early years of Seattle’s municipal government. Researchers can find material relating to the Great Fire, the development of the water supply system, solid waste, the Fire Department, women’s issues, grading and street improvements, housing, race relations, and other topics.
These records had been cataloged at the item level, but researchers needed to come to our research room to see them. In 2014, we prioritized making the collection more widely available online. In addition to increasing access, this would also limit the handling of these records, some of which have become quite fragile over the years. Thus began a major scanning project.
Records such as these cannot be run through a copier or any automatic scanning system. They must be digitized by hand, one page at a time. Using a flatbed scanner, overhead scanner, and camera, volunteers and staff over the years have captured individual high quality images of the documents. It took over a decade, but now the entire collection – over 4200 separate records – is scanned and available to view from anywhere in our Digital Collections.
Adding searchable text allows researchers to find information that had previously been hidden. Optical character recognition has been applied to typewritten documents, and volunteers have continued to help us transcribe handwritten text using our crowd-sourcing software FromThePage. The records are now findable by search engines, which increases their accessibility to anyone with an internet connection.
A heartfelt thank you to all the volunteers and work-study students over the years who assisted with this project, both on site and remotely. If you want to contribute, you still can! Transcription of handwritten documents is ongoing and can be done from anywhere – to participate, go to FromThePage and create your own free login, choose a page to transcribe, and follow the brief transcription guidelines provided.