Volunteer with us

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 volunteering

Currently all positions are filled, however, when onsite volunteering opportunities become available, they will be listed here.

Our volunteers support the following:

• Tours by our ambassadors
• Behind the scene projects
• English language improvement service

Make an enquiry

If you'd like information about our onsite volunteer programs please contact:

Phone: (08) 8207 7215
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.

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.

Read our Library Guide for more information about how to add your photos to our collection.

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. Learn more about the Australian newspaper digitisation program.

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? View this Newspaper text correction in Trove video on YouTube.

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.

Pioneer aviators, the Smith brothers and the air race of 1919

2019 is the centenary year of the prize-winning flight by Sir Ross and Sir Keith Smith and their crew - they were the first Australian aviators to fly from England to Australia within 30 days.

• Ross Smith
• Keith Smith

125^th anniversary of legislation that enabled South Australian women

December 2019 is the 125^th anniversary of legislation that enabled South Australian women – for the first time anywhere in Australia – to vote in general elections and to stand as members of Parliament.

• Women's suffrage