Historical documents could give us one perspective about events that happened in a particular period of time and it has been difficult to understand the context of a certain event without any evidence or data to give us a background of it.
With regard to the Suffragist Movement however, it's a good thing we have plenty of documents and papers. Although it might be too much for a handful of people to preserve on their own. Which is why the Library of Congress, who has possession of these documents, have sought help from volunteers to transcribe them.
The Library of Congress has already scanned the original documents into a digital library, but if you’ve ever tried to use a computer to search for a word in a scanned source, you know that it’s not easy to do—especially since decades-old documents often make for blurry scans that are difficult to decipher.
So last year, the Library of Congress launched a crowdsourcing platform called By the People, asking the public to help type up written documents word for word, which will make it easier to find and read original sources.
-via Open Culture
(Image credit: American Press Association/Wikimedia Commons)