--- title: Contributing Knowledge description: Share what you know about an item — type a note, pin a note on the image, record a voice memory or oral history, suggest a specific edit, correct a transcript, or edit inline — and track your submissions through review. section: guides order: 9 updated: 2026-07-13 verified: 2026-07-13 related: [guides/community-submissions, guides/transcription-and-ocr, guides/public-discovery, guides/working-with-artifacts] features: [community-contributions] --- # Contributing Knowledge You'll share what you know about an item in a museum's collection — a memory, an identification, a pinned note on the image, or a correction — and follow it through staff review. You need a Preservated account, but you don't need to belong to the institution. Everything you send is a proposal: museum staff review it before anything changes or appears publicly. The one exception is editing directly on the artifact page, described below — what happens there depends on your role at the institution. ## Share what you know On any artifact page, choose **Share what you know** (the speech-bubble button beside Download). Pick a method: - **Write a note** — a short freeform note. - **Record a voice note** — up to 10 minutes, transcribed as you speak (where live transcription is enabled) or automatically after you finish. - **Pin a note on the image** — draw a box on the photo and describe what you know about that spot (image artifacts). - **Pin a note on a recording** — mark a moment or stretch on an audio or video item's timeline and describe what happens there (audio and video artifacts). - **Record an oral history** — a longer, in-depth recording for stories, interviews, and recollections that need more room than a voice note. Every method starts with the same consent step: you decide whether your name may appear publicly (off by default), whether the contribution should stay museum-only, whether the museum may contact you, and whether it may re-analyze your contribution with AI later. Confirming that you created the contribution — or have permission to share it — is required. ### Write or record a note 1. Write or record. The recorder supports pause and resume, playback, and re-recording; it stops automatically at the 10-minute limit. **Alt+M** toggles the microphone (start, pause, resume) without leaving the keyboard. 2. While you speak, your words appear in the text box below the recorder as live transcript (where the museum has live transcription enabled). Pause any time, edit the text directly, then keep talking — new speech continues at the end of your edited text. What you submit is the text as you edited it; the audio recording is preserved alongside it. 3. Wait a moment while AI reads your contribution for suggested catalog changes. When there's no live transcript, voice notes are transcribed first. If processing takes unusually long, the dialog offers to let you submit anyway — any suggestions found later are attached for the museum's reviewers. 4. Review the AI's suggested catalog changes. Each shows the current value, the suggested value, a confidence score, and the quote it came from. Uncheck any suggestion you disagree with — unchecked suggestions are flagged as dropped by you, and reviewers see that. 5. Add an optional clarification for the reviewer and choose **Submit for review**. If AI processing fails, your written note still submits; the museum sees the recording and your text either way. #### Choose a microphone If you have more than one microphone, a **Microphone** picker appears above the record button once the browser has permission. Your choice is remembered on this device. While recording, the recorder shows the name of the microphone actually in use and a small level meter — if the meter stays flat while you talk, the wrong device is selected. #### Unfinished contributions Closing the dialog at the review step asks whether to submit now or keep the contribution as a draft — a draft is saved but **not** sent to the museum until you submit it. Reopening the dialog on the same item offers to resume the draft or start a new contribution, and drafts also appear under **Account → My Submissions**, where **Revise & resubmit** picks them up. Drafts count toward your daily contribution limit until you withdraw them. :::info Transcripts and suggestions are generated by AI and are advisory only. Museum staff review every contribution before anything is published or written to the record. ::: ### Pin a note on the image Draw a box around the part of the photo you want to talk about, then write what you know about it. If the pin identifies someone, check **This identifies a person** and enter their name. A pinned identification goes to a curator, who may link it to an existing person record or create a new one. New people start out **provisional** — not shown anywhere on the site — until a curator confirms them, so an unverified identification never appears as fact. Because there's no transcript to extract suggestions from, a pinned note skips the AI review step: you review your own text once, then submit. An accepted pin appears on the artifact image as a small hover highlight; visitors who hover or focus it see your note (and your name, if you chose to share it). ### Pin a note on a recording On an audio or video item, drag across the timeline below the player to mark the moment — a single instant or a stretch with a start and end — then write what you know about it. As with an image pin, check **This identifies a person** to name someone, and the same provisional-person review applies. There's no transcript to extract from, so a timeline pin also skips the AI review step. Once accepted, the pin shows up beneath the player: a marker on the timeline you can click to jump to, and a note that surfaces while playback passes through that moment. ### Record an oral history Oral histories are for longer recollections — interviews, family stories, first-hand accounts — that don't fit in a 10-minute voice note. Recordings run up to **90 minutes**. Add an optional written note alongside the recording, same as a voice note. Oral-history recordings are transcribed with **speaker labels** (diarization), so a conversation between two or more people comes back as a labeled, timeline-anchored transcript rather than one undifferentiated block of text. Because a long transcript still surfaces suggested catalog changes the same way a voice note does, you'll see the same suggestion-review step before submitting. Once accepted, an oral history appears on the artifact page in its own **Oral History** section: an audio player alongside a transcript where clicking any line jumps the audio to that point. ## Suggest a specific edit If you know exactly which field is wrong — a date, a place name, a misspelled title — choose **Suggest edit** instead. You'll see the current value beside your proposed value for each editable field: title, description, date, type, rights, places, creators, and subject terms. A few fields may show a lock: a curator has pinned that value, and changes to it will not be accepted. Fields recently edited by a curator are marked, so you know your suggestion faces closer scrutiny. A short explanation of why you're suggesting the changes is required — evidence such as "date stamp on my family's copy reads June 1926" makes acceptance far more likely. ## Suggest a transcript correction Some museums let signed-in visitors fix misread words and lines in a transcript — on an image's handwriting or OCR reading, or a document's recognized text. Where it's turned on, the artifact page's **Transcription** panel shows a **Suggest corrections** link. One error usually means more nearby, so corrections happen in a dedicated editor where you can fix as many lines as you spot and send them together. 1. Choose **Suggest corrections** in the Transcription panel. It opens the same page-by-page editor curators use, with dragging turned off. 2. Browse the item's files with the filmstrip, then click into a line's text to fix it: select a word and retype or delete it, or click between words to add one. 3. A running count in the toolbar tracks how many lines you've changed across every file. 4. Choose **Suggest corrections** to send them all as one batch, with a single optional note for the curator — how you know, such as a name you recognize, a date visible elsewhere on the item, or context that makes ambiguous handwriting legible. There's no consent step or draft stage here — unlike other contributions, your corrections go straight into the museum's review queue. Track them the same way as any other submission, from **Account → My Submissions**. If the transcript changed between opening the editor and submitting — someone else corrected it first, or a fresh OCR run replaced the reading — you're asked to reload the affected file and try again rather than risk overwriting someone else's fix. Not every museum offers this: it depends on the item having a transcript with word positions, and the museum choosing to open corrections to any signed-in visitor or to its own members only. When it's off, or you're not eligible, no **Suggest corrections** link appears, and clicking a transcript word just keeps it highlighted for comparison — see [Transcription and OCR](/docs/en-US/guides/transcription-and-ocr#see-where-each-word-sits-on-the-page). ## Edit a field directly on the page Hovering or focusing an editable field on the artifact page — the title, description, date, type, or rights statement — reveals a small pencil. Click it (or Alt+Click the field itself) to open a quick editor for just that value. Descriptive term sections (Subjects, Tags, Materials & techniques, and the rest) work the same way at the section level: hover the section's heading and click its pencil to open an editor where you can add terms or remove existing ones. To fill in something the item doesn't have yet — a missing date, a first subject term — use the small **Add a detail** control at the end of the details list (labelled **Suggest a detail** when your changes are queued for review); it lists exactly the fields that are still empty. What happens when you save depends on your role at the institution: - **Institution editors and admins**: the change applies immediately, exactly as if it were made from the edit page. It lands in the change log right away. - **Everyone else signed in** — including visitors with no membership at the institution — the change is queued as a suggestion for curator review, the same as **Suggest edit**. You'll see a **Suggest change** button instead of **Save**, and a confirmation once it's queued. - **Members with the viewer role, and signed-out visitors**, don't see the pencil at all — inline editing isn't available to either. A field a curator has pinned shows a warning in the editor and can't be changed this way, whether you'd apply immediately or only suggest. ## What happens after you submit Museum reviewers see your contribution in their queue. They can accept some or all suggestions, edit values before applying, ask you a question (you'll get the comment on your submission), or decline with a reason. Accepted knowledge may also be published as a **Community Note** on the artifact page — with your name only if you opted in, and never publicly if you chose museum-only. Accepted public contributions — notes, pinned annotations, and oral-history transcripts — also become findable in search: a matching result shows a "Community note" snippet alongside the usual title and description match. Anything you marked museum-only is never searchable by the public, and anything withdrawn or redacted drops out of search entirely. Track everything from **Account → My Submissions**: status, which institution has it, a preview of what you wrote, and a link back to the artifact. Expand any submission to read your full note and its timeline — status changes and any questions reviewers asked you. You can withdraw a submission any time before it's decided. On the artifact page itself, a small indicator reminds you when you have contributions pending review there. ### Stay notified A bell in the top bar keeps you current without checking back. A badge on it counts unread notices; open it to see recent activity on your contributions and jump straight to the one that changed. You're notified when a reviewer **accepts and applies** your contribution, **declines** it, **asks for changes**, **comments** on it, or **publishes** it as a public Community Note. Selecting a notice marks it read and takes you to **My Submissions** (or, for a published note, the artifact page); **Mark all read** clears the badge. These are status updates about your own contributions, so you always receive them in the app regardless of whether you allowed the museum to contact you — that choice governs outreach, not the progress of what you sent. ### Respond to a reviewer's questions When a reviewer returns your contribution with comments, its status changes to **Changes requested**. Open it in **My Submissions** to read their questions, then choose **Revise & resubmit**: for a written or recorded note you can edit your text and change which AI suggestions you keep or drop, then send it back for review. Your original recording stays attached — re-recording isn't supported, but your revised text and a clarifying comment travel with it. For a suggested edit or a pinned annotation, return to the artifact page and submit a fresh suggestion instead. ## Withdrawal and retention Before a decision, **Withdraw** on My Submissions pulls a submission back entirely. After a contribution is accepted, you can still remove it from public view: expand it in **My Submissions** and choose **Remove public display**. The note (or pin, or oral history) stops rendering on the artifact page and drops out of search. The museum preserves the original archival record — including audio and transcript — for scholarship, as stated in the consent step; removal hides the public display but does not erase the archive.