Making A Mark In History: Citizen Archivist Project
Through the Citizen Archivist Project, anyone can discover and write about events in Singapore’s past.

Before the Formula One night races, there was the Singapore Grand Prix in 1966. Mr Peter Pak wasn’t yet born then, nor is he a car expert. But that did not stop him from volunteering to give captions for photos of the race on the Citizen Archivist Project online portal, run by the National Archives of Singapore (NAS).

The heritage enthusiast had found a newspaper article listing the race categories, drivers’ names and vehicles. “With that and by cross-referencing pictures of similar car makes and models, I was able to provide a few descriptions,” he says.


“I take pride in seeing what I have personally transcribed and described accepted by the professionals at the NAS,” he says.
Besides describing historical images, volunteers can also transcribe manuscripts and audio recordings on the portal. The aim is to make these artefacts, often passed to the NAS with little information, searchable for researchers and anyone interested in Singapore’s past.


As of March 2016, volunteers have contributed captions to more than 1,700 photos and transcribed more than 13,000 documents. Most of the manuscripts are Straits Settlement Records, a collection of colonial government documents dating back to the 1800s. The NAS hopes to have as many as possible of these records transcribed by 2019, in time for the 200th anniversary of Raffles’ landing in Singapore.

And that is why the Project team is calling for more volunteers. Public officers, in particular, could be familiar with topics related to the colonial government, says Ms Huang. While times have changed, the manuscripts show that public officials, then as now, had to deal with communicating policies effectively, addressing public feedback and even putting up business cases for their proposals.
For 16-year-old volunteer Wee Li Shyen, the chance to see the centuries-old letters of Sir Stamford Raffles, William Farquhar and John Crawford got her excited to get involved: “Learning what life was like in the early days … spurred me on.”

The manuscripts’ cursive script and content, written in “a very different English from what we use today”, took her a while to decipher, but it became easier over time.
“Letters that proved interesting touched on Raffles’ unhappiness with Farquhar, how Raffles reprimanded and later fired him as Resident. It was rather amusing that the language used was very polite, but the intent was not,” says the teenager.
- POSTED ON
Jul 7, 2016
- TEXT BY
Chia Soong Ming
Siti Maziah Masramli
- PHOTOS BY
The National Archives Of Singapore
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