This brief presentation discusses some of the key challenges in setting up community collections/corwdsourcing projects. There are some notes attached to the slides with a bit of background on the projects mentioned on the slides.
1. Community collections:
what are
the
challenges
?
Paola Marchionni, Programme Manager Digitisation
p.marchionni@jisc.ac.uk @paolamarchionni
2. What did we do?
programme to foster public engagement with
online content
Why did we do it?
*rise of social media * lots of interesting content,
knowledge and expertise out there *widening
participation and public engagement agendas
*new approaches to digitisation and content
creation *two-way engagement between content
providers and audiences
3. Challenge #1:
engaging a variety of communities
•There are many disparate
‘communities’ out there to
potentially engage with, with their
own ‘culture’: schools, heritage
orgs; socially excluded groups,
citizen at large
•How do we successfully engage
with all of them? What are the
barriers?
•What kind of interaction (human
mediation/automated task-based)
and technologies will be
appropriate? (eg digitisation,
transcription, UGC, task resolution)
4. Challenge #2:
blurring the boundaries,
‘users’ as creators
•Paradigm shift where
members of the public are not
just ‘users’ or ‘volunteers’ but
become creators, co-curators,
cataloguers, editors, historians,
digitisation collaborators.
•But what implications does
this have on notions of trust,
authority, quality, IPR?
•What does this mean for
researchers, educators,
learners?
5. Challenge #3:
motivation, recognition and impact
•People/communities will need
some kind of motivation and
gratification for taking part.
•How do we ensure this is a two-
way exchange where all parties
benefit (eg sharing knowledge
and expertise, developing digital
literacy, encouraging social
cohesion…)
•Making it fun?
•Providing reward opportunities?
6. Challenge #4:
it’s not all ‘free’– sustainability
•A lot of resources go into
community collections
projects: technical
infrastructure, community
interaction, data
management,
maintenance…
•How can community
collections/crowdsourcing
be developed as part of a
larger public engagement
mission?
•What about scalability?
7. Screen grabs on slides
JISC Content portal : www.jisc-content.ac.uk (all digital collections funded or
licenced by JISC)
JISC Community Collections programmes:
Developing Community Content http://bit.ly/LaEuDM
Content programme 2011 Strand B: Developing Community
Collections http://bit.ly/UrXDDf
My Leicestershire History – Image ref http://bit.ly/PKj6CQ (cover slide)
Strandlines http://www.strandlines.net/ (slide 2)
Old Weather http://www.oldweather.org/ (slide 2)
RunCoCo/Great War Archive http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/ and
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/ (slide 3)
Transcribe Bentham: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/ (slide 3)
Digitalkoot http://www.digitalkoot.fi/en (slide 4)
My Leicestershire History http://myleicestershire.org.uk – Image ref:
http://cdm16445.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16445coll2/id/8
35) (slide 4)
Old Weather http://www.oldweather.org/ (slide 5)
8. Other JISC resources
Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement
http://bit.ly/KhjrJU (feasibility study on running community
collections projects)
“ RunCoCo: how to run a community collection online” in
Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources
http://bit.ly/KJ0WhB
Capturing the Power of the Crowd and the Challenge of
Community Collections http://bit.ly/PJV374
Forthcoming (Jan 2013)
Evaluation and synthesis of JISC Developing Community
Content and Developing Community Collections programmes
(for more information, please email Paola Marchionni
p.marchionni@jisc.ac.uk)
Editor's Notes
In 2010-2011 JISC funded two programmes which included over 20 projects focusing on developing community collections as a partnership between Higher Education Institutions and the wider sector, including community and heritage organisations, specialist groups, the private sector and the public at large. Details of the programme are on slide #7.
Strandlines and the Old Weathercan be seen as “community collections” projects at the two end of a spectrum. Strandlines http://www.strandlines.net worked very closely with specific community groups along the Strand (one of London’s most famous streets), including homeless people, over 50s, and a life writing group. The main aim was to gather their stories and experiences of living or working along the Strand. The digital interaction was very much mediated by human interaction.Old Weather http://www.oldweather.org/ attracted citizens at large in a crowdsourcing project where people were asked to transcribe pages from WW1 naval log books. The main form of interaction was online and task-based, although the project did have an online forum for participants to keep in touch with each other.
The RunCoCO project http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/ and its predecessor the Great War Archive http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/ held a number of events in public places such as libraries both in the UK and in Europe where they were helping people digitise and catalogue their own WW1 objects, such as letters and photographs. All the digitised items were then uploaded on the Great War Archive web site or its related Flickr group.Transcribe Bentham http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/ has engaged almost 2000 volunteers (1,948 as of 1 October 2012) in transcribing and editing the manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham.
Digitalkoothttp://www.digitalkoot.fi/en has used gaming techniques to encourage people to help fix mistakes in OCR’d old Finnish newspapers in order to increase the accuracy of text-based searches of the archives.My Leicestershire History http://myleicestershire.org.uk worked with Leicester-based local history groups in digitising their archives. Both parties gained access to expertise and resources from each other.
Sustainability and scalability are key challenges for community collections projects. Projects such as Old Weather have made use of an existing platform (from the Zooniverse suite of projects https://www.zooniverse.org/) which allows them to approach crowdsourcing in a strategic way, and move on to the next project once the previous one is completed.