Transcribing letters from the NHM archive using Wikisource

As an experiment John Cummings, Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Natural History Museum has made a few selected scans from the museum's archive available for transcription on Wikisource.

To familiarise myself with Wikisource I have translated the following letter from Charles Harte to Walter Rothschild. Harte worked as an impresario for Mademoiselle Paula (the famous reptile conqueror), and was offering Rothschild the chance to buy a snake from her collection.

You can read the transcription over at wikisource: Mdlle Paula, the famous reptile conqueror
(Click on the page numbers at the bottom of that page to view the transcriptions)

There is some background to this letter in this blog post on the NHM website: Item of the month (October 2011) Paula conquerors a time gone by and an old press cutting from the Otago Daily Times: Reptile Handling for a Livelihood.

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There is a list of other letters from the archive that you can have a go at translating on our GLAM project page.

Tags: wikisource, wikipedia, Natural History Museum