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Volunteers and their contribution are vital to the State Library of South Australia. They are involved in a wide variety of roles which help make our collections more accessible both online and onsite and to extend our range of in-house services.

OnSite volunteers

An Ambassador at the State Library provides a high-quality visitor experience for people from a wide range of backgrounds and with a diverse range of needs and expectations. Ambassador guides provide tours for individuals and small groups.

Our onsite volunteer recruitment program is currently on hold, but you can register your future interest by contacting us at slsa.volunteering@sa.gov.au.

Keep an eye on this page for future opportunities, but for now becoming a digital volunteer is a valuable contribution. Please see more information below.

Make an enquiry

If you'd like information about our onsite volunteer programs please contact:
Email: slsa.volunteering@sa.gov.au

Become a digital volunteer

The State Library of South Australia needs your help to make our digital collections more accessible and more meaningful so that everyone can use and share them. You can help us by becoming a digital volunteer.

You decide what you'd like to work on, when and for how long. We will be grateful for any time you can spare to help us. Current opportunities include:

Oral History Tagging

Help unearth hidden content! Our oral history collections comprise of hundreds of hours of interviews. The brief summaries of the interviews do not always highlight all the subject matter covered. Can you help make the content more accessible by listening to them and adding topic tags to 'index' the content?

The State Library has added two collections of oral histories to our Digital Collections website.

  • S.A. Speaks: An Oral History of Life in South Australia before 1930 - firsthand accounts of life in early 20th century South Australia.
  • Treading Out the Vintage - A National Wine Centre Oral History Project with interviews with members of the Australian wine industry, including stories of individual grape growers, winemakers, companies and wine retailers which will never appear in official company histories or authorised biographies.
  • Italian Market Gardeners - interviews with members of Italian families who originated from the north of Italy in the Veneto region worked market gardens in the area know as St James Park from the late 1920s, now the suburb of Kidman Park, Adelaide.
  • Living in Woomera - Interviews conducted for the Life at Woomera Oral History Project documenting life at Woomera, South Australia, established to support the Anglo-Australian long-range weapons testing facility.

How to start

Register via the Login on the Digital Collections website and watch our video to find out how to do it.

Identify World War I Soldiers

Are you able to identify any of our unidentified soldiers in the photographs or add more detail, such as service details, biographical information or stories of interest?

We have over 500 First World War portraits in our South Australians of World War I Flickr group, taken from our Chamberlain collection and our Ron Blum collection. These have been combined with a series of photographic portraits of South Australian soldiers, sailors and nurses supplied by State Records of South Australia. In some cases, very little detail is known about the soldiers featured, a one-word name written on a photo chit or sometimes not even that.

How to start

Sign up to Flickr then search for the soldier's identities.

Put A Face To The Name

We're looking for photographs of the soldiers featured in the records of the South Australian Red Cross Information Bureau collection website. From 1916 until 1919, the South Australian Red Cross Information Bureau performed the service of undertaking research into over 8,000 enquiries from family and friends of missing Australian Imperial Force personnel fighting in World War I.

How to start

View the list of soldiers then search the internet for photos. (This link opens in Google Docs.)

When you find one, record the URL of the source of the photo on the list (so that we know who's been found) and add the image to the soldier's record on the South Australian Red Cross Information Bureau collection website. You can add as many photos to each record as you like. There's no need to sign up, but you'll need to provide a name and email address when you upload a photo to our website. The name, but not the email address, will be visible on the site once the submission has been approved.

Newspapers transcribed on Trove

Trove is the National Library's online newspaper catalogue. Australian State and Territory libraries digitise newspapers and make them accessible on Trove. 

Digitised newspapers are transcribed electronically, however, this process isn't always accurate due to the quality of the original newspapers or small text size. Correcting the text of the newspaper helps the public retrieve better search results.

Want to know how to get started with Trove text correction? Read the guide to text correction on the National Library's website.

Correct enough text and you could feature in the Text Correction Hall of Fame!

How to start

Sign up to Trove then review and update the transcriptions.

Themed articles

About the collection: We've created defined searches for certain types of South Australian newspaper articles with the themes listed below.

What needs correcting: The following groups of themed articles need to be reviewed and updated within Trove.

aDELAIDE TOWN ACRES

In 1837, South Australian Surveyor-General, Colonel William Light laid out a Plan of Adelaide, which divided the city land of North Adelaide and South Adelaide into 1042 town acres; 700 of the acres were located in South Adelaide (the CBD), and the remaining 342 were located in North Adelaide.

The Acres were bought and sold many times in the early years of European settlement in Adelaide.

See our research guide about how to research the history of these individual town acres (also referred as city acres) or specific buildings located within the city acres. 

PIONEER AVIATORS, THE SMITH BROTHERS AND THE AIR RACE OF 1919

On 19 March 1919 Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes announced a competition for the first Australian aviators to fly from England to Australia within 30 days with a prize of £10 000. South Australian brothers Ross Smith (pilot) and Keith Smith (navigator) with engineers Walter Shiers (SA) and James Bennett (Vic) were the first successful crew.

In 2019, the centenary year of the prize-winning flight, we celebrated them and their significant achievement which paved the way for postal and commercial flights to Australia. The personal papers of Sir Ross and Sir Keith Smith held by the State Library of South Australia have been digitised and are now available through Digital Collections.