Crowdsourcing or BustArchives NZ’s ‘The Indexer’

Tracie Almond

23 April 2013

What is The Indexer?

• A crowd-sourcing tool for ‘virtual volunteers’ to transcribe the contents of indexes from scanned images.

Archives NZ’s Project Objective

• Improve the findability of archives that rely on secondary finding aids (e.g. name indexes).

Supporting the long term vision that:

• We have a single, integrated set of finding aids available online for public use.

Problems we’re trying to solve

• Current search tools do not find some archives well due to the archives being described at a fairly lumpy level.

• Names, places and other useful information are often only in indexes, etc. The indexes are often in paper form, so only available in our offices.

• We are not serving our researchers as well as we could if we had that material incorporated into our online search tools.

• We can then link to digital copies of the archive and reduce the need for people to visit our offices.

Archives NZ has about

1 million entries

it would like to capture –

like these ...

Class List – YCAF 4135 (example of Single entry type)

Hospital Index (example of Single entry type)

Auckland Hospital Charitable Aid – Application for Relief

(example of Single & Multiple entry type)

BBCB 4243 Māori Succession Register (example of Multiple entry type)

The Indexer

Project benefits

• High priority secondary finding aids will be accessible to our search engines.

• Archives NZ will have the infrastructure needed to capture and make available many of the other high priority secondary finding aids.

• We will increase our pool of volunteers and community involvement by providing online tools.

Lessons learned

• Do your research – others have gone before and can provide great advice

• Use a professional interface designer – it doesn’t cost much more to make it look nice and be a good user experience

• Plan for openness – use authorities, make an API, open source the software (easier to do if you plan it in)

Do your research

• Try out the other projects out there already – see what you do and don’t like

• Talk to those who’ve done it – get their advice

• Read up on the science behind it

Use a professional interface designer

• It doesn’t cost much – less than $6k for The Indexer (including usability testing)

• Test on users at the design stage and again before release

• Result is tailored to the tasks but still clean

Plan for Openness

• Can you use a metadata standard?

• Can you adopt widely used name or place authorities?

• Can you make an API to share the data?

• Can you open source your software?