The National Library of Finland is trying to digitize its archives and has asked the public for help.

Digitalkoot is a joint project with the National Library of Finland and Microtask. Our goal is to index these archives so that they are searchable on the Internet. This will enable everyone to easily access our cultural heritage.

You can help us by playing games.

In the games, you fix words of old Finnish newspapers stored in the newspaper archive of the National Library. This greatly increases the accuracy of text-bases searches in the newspaper archive.

Most of the material of the newspaper archive has already been copied into computer databases using computerized text recognition. However, computers fail to recognize all the words. Especially when the quality of the source material is poor, the results need to be fixed by hand. This requires a lot of manual work.

In digitalkoot you can help by correcting words. Later this year you can also help by structuring the documents and tagging images.

They have come up with two games: Mole Bridge and Mole Hunt which you can play, and in doing so digitize words that the computer has missed. Clever!

Read Write Web reports that the Director of the Library said:

“We wanted to set up ‘Angry Birds for the Thinking Person’ – something which entertains but is also useful to us as a nation,” says Ekholm, who anticipates teachers and children will enjoy volunteering to help these digitization efforts. Additional phases of the project will be aimed at “more serious historical buffs.”

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