Archivists and librarians
cataloguing, digitization, locating records
Many of these problems are stalled not for lack of ideas but because the records that would settle them are uncatalogued, undigitized, or scattered across institutions. Archivists and librarians know where those records are, what condition they are in, and what it would take to make them searchable.
23 problems need archivists and librarians
- 01Who printed the anonymous and false-imprint books of eighteenth-century Britain?
Index printing-house ledgers, State Papers and Treasury Solicitor libel files by title and date so each ornament attribution can be checked against a payment, warrant or examination.
Texts & authorship · Europe · 1695–1800also needs data scientists and conservation scientists - 02How, if at all, did Copernicus learn of the Maragha-school planetary models?
Examine ownership notes, bindings and library inventories of Greek and Hebrew astronomical miscellanies in Italian, Polish and Central European collections, including the Jagiellonian Library.
Science & knowledge · Europe · 1250–1543also needs philologists - 03What new evidence can fix when and why five historically extinct species disappeared?
Inventory the VOC Mauritius correspondence, Icelandic district records and Russian voyage papers that mention these species, and report which series remain untranscribed or uncatalogued.
Chronology · Global · 1500–1945also needs geneticists, data scientists, philologists, archaeologists, computational linguists and GIS specialists - 04Which lost works of Galen survive unrecognised in Arabic and Syriac?
Identify unedited Galenic translations listed by Sezgin, Ullmann and Fichtner in the Süleymaniye, Iranian libraries and the Escorial, and arrange imaging and catalogue records.
Texts & authorship · Middle East · 160–1270also needs philologists and computational linguists - 05Were real wages in the Yangzi delta and Bengal comparable to England's before 1750?
Identify and image the Huizhou account books and Bengal factory diaries that record wages and prices, with item-level finding aids so each quotation can be traced.
Economy · Global · 1500–1850also needs economists and data scientists - 06By what route did knowledge of gunpowder reach Latin Europe in the thirteenth century?
Locate, describe and date the earliest Liber ignium, Feuerwerkbuch and Arabic furūsiyya witnesses in Paris, Munich, Leeds, Istanbul and Cairo, and report which remain undigitized.
Science & knowledge · Global · 1040–1350also needs philologists - 07How many people were carried in the Indian Ocean slave trades, 1500–1850?
Flag mentions of enslaved people in the GLOBALISE transcriptions of the VOC Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren and the Cape Slave Office deeds, and draft source-linked transfer records.
Economy · Indian Ocean · 1500–1850also needs data scientists - 08How many Indigenous people were enslaved in the Americas between 1492 and 1900?
Transcribe and flag candidate entries in the Escribanos de Santiago and Real Audiencia records for 1608–1683, linking the same person across sales, baptisms, lawsuits and inventories.
Demography · Americas · 1492–1900also needs demographers - 09How many people were killed in the Irish rising of 1641?
Code each deposition in TCD MS 836 for reported killings, recording victim, place, date, manner and whether the deponent was an eyewitness or repeating hearsay.
Demography · Europe · 1641–1642also needs data scientists and GIS specialists - 10Did Kerala-school infinite series reach early modern Europe through Jesuit missionaries?
Read the Documenta Indica and the ARSI Goa-Malabar letters for references to Indian astronomy, Brahmin informants and mathematical manuscripts, and register each mention by Jesuit, place and date.
Science & knowledge · South Asia · 1350–1700also needs philologists - 11How many early printed editions have been lost without trace?
Reconstruct earlier states of ISTC and GW from published versions and dated records, and build one record per edition with surviving copy count, format, language and sheet count.
Texts & authorship · Europe · 1450–1600also needs data scientists - 12Can the Meroitic language be translated beyond its funerary formulae?
Turn the scanned REM volumes on Persée and inscriptions published since 2000 into a lemmatized, machine-readable corpus, recording which editor made each word segmentation.
Languages & scripts · Africa · 300 BCE–450 CEalso needs philologists and archaeologists - 13What texts did Newton copy in the alchemical manuscripts whose sources are unidentified?
Search catalogues of seventeenth-century chymical manuscripts in Ashmole, Sloane, Mellon and Boyle collections for recipe books matching the titles, sequences and folio numbering in Newton's copies.
Texts & authorship · Europe · 1660–1700also needs philologists, computational linguists and conservation scientists - 14What do the thousands of unread Shang oracle-bone graphs mean?
Link rubbings, photographs and catalogue numbers for the same piece across the Heji, the Mobendaxi, Yinqi Wenyuan and museum databases into one open concordance.
Languages & scripts · East Asia · 1250–1046 BCEalso needs philologists and computational linguists - 15Did the population of Ottoman Anatolia collapse in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
Locate and transcribe tahrir, avarız and cizye registers for the same districts in the TT.d, MAD.d and KK.d series, tracing every figure to a register page.
Demography · Middle East · 1520–1700also needs demographers and GIS specialists - 16Why did plague disappear from western Europe after the early eighteenth century?
Digitize and extract ship arrivals, bills of health and quarantine durations from the health office archives of Marseille, Venice, Livorno, Genoa, Dubrovnik and Malta.
Disease · Europe · 1650–1850also needs epidemiologists and geneticists - 17How literate was the population of late imperial China?
Locate signature blocks in the Huizhou, Qingshui River and Taiwan deed facsimile series and record each party's form of subscription and the named scribe.
Texts & authorship · East Asia · 1644–1911also needs data scientists - 18Were Moses Shapira's Deuteronomy fragments an ancient text or an 1880s forgery?
Locate and describe every surviving witness, from British Library Add MS 41294 and the Berlin Shapira inventory to the 1883 lithographs, so they can be aligned as variants.
Texts & authorship · Middle East · 1878–1885also needs philologists and conservation scientists - 19How much American silver reached China between 1550 and 1800?
Read the Manila treasury accounts and galleon registers in the AGI against the Ramo Filipinas in the AGN to produce a reconciled Acapulco-Manila series for 1571 to 1815.
Economy · Global · 1550–1800also needs economists and data scientists - 20Who supplied the medical knowledge that Hans Sloane's catalogues attribute to unnamed people?
Image and item-level catalogue the Sloane correspondence volumes not yet indexed by the Sloane Letters Project, and photograph original labels on Vegetable Substances specimens with anonymous attributions.
Science & knowledge · Global · 1680–1753also needs computational linguists, philologists and data scientists - 21When did the thylacine go extinct in the wild?
Identify and list the Tasmanian Archives, wildlife-service and museum files holding post-1910 thylacine reports, bounty payments and zoo records, and prioritize the undigitized series for scanning.
Chronology · Pacific · 1888–2019also needs data scientists, geneticists and GIS specialists - 22Which volcanoes caused the great unattributed sulfate spikes in polar ice, above all 1809?
Trace each claimed eyewitness report of ashfall, dimmed sun or red twilights back to its original text and edition, recording exact wording, place and date.
Places · Global · 1229–1810also needs geoscientists - 23What do James Wilkinson's unread coded dispatches to Spanish officials say?
Locate the Library of Congress photostats of AGI Papeles de Cuba legajos 2373 to 2375 and compare them with the originals in Seville.
Texts & authorship · Americas · 1787–1807also needs cryptographers
Can you help?
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Drafted by Claude Opus 5.5