citizen historians

I've been studying the "Children of the Lodz Ghetto" project at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This is a collaboration between a team of experts and "citizen historians" using online databases and other internet tools. The project started in 2008, aiming to document the lives of as many as possible of the more than 13,000 children who signed the Lodz ghetto schools album in 1941.
Children of the Lodz Ghetto is an example of lay persons being integrated into original research, where volunteer efforts can make a real difference on what stories will be known about people from the not so distant past.
This is a style of collaboration that many other institutions would do well to try to duplicate. My congratulations to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and its "citizen historians" for being in the forefront!