Crowdsourcing Historical Ship Weather Logs

When I used to work for the National Climatic Data Center during college, one of my jobs was to open the mail, some of which were Ship Weather Logs, often handwritten by captains of various vessels across the waters. These observations are important because there are few meteorological stations in the oceans - they can help fill in holes in historical hurricane tracks and world climate.

A friend of mine pointed out this article on The Economist about how scientists are now "crowdsourcing" the transcription of these logs (which, because handwritten in cursive, cannot be read by Optical Character Recognition software). What that means is that they're asking weather enthusiasts -- and in fact anyone -- worldwide to help transcribe them, in order to speed up the process.

These particular ship logs are from World War I., although I'm sure there are more out there from as far back as the 1800s if not further. So if you've got too much time on your hands, sign up at OldWeather.Org and help out!