Crowds & CommunitiesUser Participation in the Archives

Alexandra Eveleigh

UKAD Archives Discovery Forum

The National Archives

3 March 2011

What is ‘User Participation’?

Image: Online Communities 2 (2010) http://xkcd.com/802/

What is ‘User Participation’?

User Participation (a working definition):

• Designed to make use of users’ skills, knowledge or creativity

• User-focused, perhaps user-led

• Reciprocal• Online• Focused upon

description & resource discovery (metadata creation & re-use)

Postmodernist Utopia or Professionalism At Risk?

Cartoon: Peter Steiner, The New Yorker (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20), 5 July 1993

Serious Leisure: Amateurs or Experts?

“I hope there always will be, room for the Amateur, and in large numbers…the Local Official or other enthusiast whose Archives do not need and cannot claim the whole of his time; but who can find enough to undertake their listing or repair or photographing and wishes to acquire, within those limits, something of a professional technique.”

Hilary Jenkinson, October 1947.Inaugural lecture for a new course in Archive

Administration at University College London.

Communities: Volunteers and Professionals

Revolution or Evolution in Archival Practice and Professionalism?

• Crowds or communities - is user participation a new phenomenon, or similar to previous outreach and volunteering initiatives?

• Do user participation initiatives really attract ‘new’ users or do current design models effectively limit the participant pool to existing ‘experts’?

• What are the implications of collaboratively authored descriptions for archival authority and control?

• What role does the professional archivist have to play in the moderation of user-contributed metadata?

What motivates participation?

• What are the optimal frameworks for participation?

• How can systems be designed to motivate and reward contributions?

• How effective are contribution rate statistics as a motivational tool?

• Do contributors value acknowledgement?

• Is competition ‘healthy’ as a means to motivate contribution?

‘Crowdsourcing’

• Extended control• Predefined tasks• Project-based• Wide range of

potential participants• Quantitative incentive

mechanisms• Gaps & errors

highlighted

Crowds & Communities(Adapted from Haythornthwaite, 2009)

Communities• Specialist knowledge or

skills (novice to expert)• Sustained commitment• Intrinsically motivated• Group norms; social

rewards• Attribution & reputation• Shared responsibility for

product & process

Crowds• Open membership: low

barriers to entry• Dip-in, dip-out• Extrinsically motivated• Granular task, predefined

by external authority• Anonymous• Quantitative recognition

mechanisms eg contribution rate

http://www.flickr.com/photos/-bast-/349497988/

Alexandra Eveleigh

alexandra.eveleigh.09@ucl.ac.uk

@ammeveleigh

http://80gb.wordpress.com

List of Examples

• Ancestry World Archives Project - http://community.ancestry.co.uk/wap/download.aspx

• Exploring Surrey's Past - http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/• Family Search Indexing - http://indexing.familysearch.org/• flickr Commons - http://www.flickr.com/commons/• FromThePage - http://beta.fromthepage.com/• Living the Poor Life - http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/living-poor-life.htm• Militieregisters - http://militieregisters.nl/• My Brighton and Hove - http://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/• Old Weather - http://www.oldweather.org/• Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections - http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/• Revisiting Archives – available from http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/• The Visible Archive - http://visiblearchive.blogspot.com/• Transcribe Bentham -

http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/Transcribe_Bentham• Waisda - http://waisda.nl/• Your Archives - http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk