Big news at the Washington State Archives! In an effort to expand public access to our rapidly growing collection and to draft some of our users as honorary archivists, we have launched Scribe, a digital tool for adding metadata to our collections.

Metadata is what helps users find digital records. When you search our marriage records for “Smith” for example, the search tool goes through and pulls those for brides and grooms named Smith. That metadata was largely entered by hand, by employees and volunteers at the Washington State Archives reading documents one at a time and adding names, dates, and other data into a spreadsheet.

Scribe opens up this process to the world. Check out this introductory tutorial video, then click on this link to get started.