Saida Gordon, a University at Buffalo senior, said she did not know how rich Buffalo’s history was until she started interning with Barbara Seals Nevergold and Peggy Brooks-Bertram.

The two created the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, an online archive that contains hundreds of biographies, oral histories, photographs, documents and historical vignettes of “lesser-known,” or unheralded people, in local communities. The Web site, which is 11 years old, also includes an Uncrowned Kings component.

Tishina Daniel, also UB student, said the internship has given her a lot of insight into the local African-American community.

“It’s showing to me all of the good we have done in the community,” she said. “Small people can make a big difference.”

Gordon and Daniel are working on an Uncrowned Queens digital literacy project that features a specially designed digital kiosk that allows library patrons to make submissions to the Uncrowned Queens Web site. The kiosk is a way to collect the stories of all types of people into one central location so others can access it.

The digital archive project and kiosk — launched Saturday in the Frank E. Merriweather Library— are evidence that researchers, university scholars and historians are not the only ones who can write history.

The booth, which Seals Nevergold and Brooks-Bertram hope will be the first of many around the country, is equipped with a computer, camera, microphones, scanner and other technology to record histories.

Users register online to become a member, get a user name and password and then can begin writing or editing. They can upload pictures from digital cameras or create an audio file of an interview. People doing their own biographies can take a picture on the spot and can scan and include such documents as slave papers or birth certificates.

Library staffers have been trained on the equipment and can assist users. And each submission goes through a vetting process to make sure the information submitted is correct.

UB interns, including Gordon and Daniel, write biographies and help Seals Nevergold and Brooks- Bertram review the information before publication on the Web site.

The addition of the kiosk streamlines the biography-writing process, Brooks-Bertram said. Before, the two women had sole responsibility for inputting the biographies for the Web site, which became a huge task. Some of the information given to them was handwritten and difficult to decipher, jotted down on scraps of paper, or even on the back of chewing gum wrappers.

The kiosk cost about $30,000 and was funded by the City of Buffalo, the Baird Foundation, Blue- Cross BlueShield of Western New York, the state, UB and its Digital Library Center and the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

The cost of additional kiosks will decrease because there is now a prototype, Seals Nevergold said.

“This is our way of franchising,” she said. “Now we can replicate the model in different communities across the country.”