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Transcript of ukad 2011
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
@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