DIY History lets you do it yourself to help make historic artifacts easier to use. The Iowa Digital Library holds hundreds of thousands of items—much more than library staff could ever catalog alone, so they are appealing to the public to help out by attaching text in the form of transcriptions, tags, and comments. Through "crowdsourcing," or engaging volunteers to contribute effort toward large-scale goals, these mass quantities of digitized artifacts become searchable, allowing researchers to quickly seek out specific information, and general users to browse and enjoy the materials more easily. Please help preserve our past by keeping the historic record accessible—one page or picture at a time.

Content on DIY History is drawn from the Iowa Digital Library, featuring digitized selections from the University of Iowa Libraries' Special Collections, University Archives, and Iowa Women's Archives. DIY History is continuously updated with additional content.