Wish upon a star: making crowdsourcing in cultural heritage a reality

Digikult 2017Dr Mia Ridge @mia_out

Digital Curator, British Library

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/15472779199

https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/4659373140

Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is...

...asking the public to do tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal related to cultural

heritage collections or knowledge

...often 'microtasks' like transcribing or categorising

http://familysearch.org

Technology helps... But ultimately crowdsourcing

is all about people

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/02/james-murray/

James Murray, editor, OED, with contributor slips

Why ask the public to help?

Defining success: productivity

Defining success: reach

http://community.zooniverse.org/

http://herbariaunited.org

Defining success: engagement

Example projects

'Type what you see''Describe what you see''Share what you know''Validate other inputs'

FamilySearch Indexing

Ancient Liveshttp://ancientlives.org

Flickr and Flickr Commons

Art UK Tagger

PCF Image Recognition

Micropasts photo masking

http://micropasts.org

Crowdsourcing in the real world

https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3072281873

Motivations as design guidelines

https://www.flickr.com/photos/statensarkiver/8975684669

Altruistic motivations• helping to provide an accurate record of

local history

Intrinsic motivations• reading 18thC handwriting is an

enjoyable puzzle

Extrinsic motivations• an academic collecting a quote from a

primary source

Understand why people participate

Use motivations as design guidelines

https://www.flickr.com/photos/statensarkiver/8975684669

People want:• satisfying work to do• the experience of being good at something• time spent with people we like• the chance to be a part of something bigger

(Jane McGonigal, 2009)

Put work into invitations

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14592517038

Be prepared for window shoppers

https://www.flickr.com/photos/twm_news/6841092248

Make it easy to get started

Good task design is hard

Task complexity vs audience size

https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2162650585

Tedi

um

Com

plex

ity

Participation

Design task ecosystems

http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/

http://transcription.si.edu/

Revel in niche topics and challenges

'no plan survives contact with the crowd'

With apologies to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/5786204856

It takes work to be a good host

Design for on-going participation

What support do staff need?https://www.flickr.com/photos/stockholmtransportmuseum_commons/8744070574

Plan for ingest and workflow

Plan a graceful exithttps://www.flickr.com/photos/fylkesarkiv/4545543824

Tack!

A question for you

If enhanced data was available (e.g. from crowdsourcing or

computational methods), how could you overcome barriers to

integrate it into your core cataloguing systems?

Who am I?• Digital Curator, BL• 'Making Digital History:

the impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research'

• MSc in human-computer interaction: crowdsourcing games to improve object metadata to enhance museum collections