A presentation to accompany the report RunCoCo: How to Run a Community Collection Online (2011) http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/resources/RunCoCo_Report.pdf
6. “ ” Crowdsourcing is when a problem is broadcast to a wide audience or community that could solve the problem collectively. Mundane tasks could be outsourced to a motivated and enthusiastic community of experts. The community can assess the answers and provide the quality assurance. - JISC
26. “ ” Knowledge is no longer restricted to the boundaries of universities and higher education facilities. These institutions no longer have a monopoly on where good ideas come from, nor how information and knowledge is used. They cannot control how the knowledge they create is used and where it is accessed . – DEMOS, The Edgeless University
Election night crowd, Wellington, 1931 Photographer: William Hall Raine Election night crowd, Wellington, 1931 Reference number: 1/2-066547-F Original negative Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library No known copyright
c. 6000 digital images of primary source material (manuscripts, letters, service records) from major British WW1 poets. Online corpora of the full-texts of the poems. c. 500 Multimedia objects (photographs, audio and video) from the IWM. Publications of War (recruitment posters, trench papers etc.) Supporting educational materials (tutorials, resource packs, podcasts etc.)
To a certain extent this was a risky venture. What if nobody submitted anything? What if nobody turned up on the submission days? Was our system just going to get spammed by the world’s pornographers? Would we be inundated with material that was fake, or irrelevant? The results were the exact opposite. In 16 weeks we ‘collected’ over 6,500 items. We are demonstrating that this can get together big digital collections, and people are willing to do it because they want these things to be recorded. 42 unique unpublished diaries by soldiers from a range of battlefields 63 memoirs 255 unpublished letters Over 700 photographs, pamphlets, local recruiting posters, images of rare objects (such as the original designs for the tomb of the unknown soldier) Even material saved from the skip!
6500 items submitted to the Great War Archive in just 4 months
Must ensure that contribution benefits participants, contributors and volunteers and well as the institution running the initiative Establishing successful two-way engagement takes a lot of effort, but it is worth it. Sharing knowledge and engaging with the public in academic work is of mutual benefit to the community and to the institution. In building community collections we are also building communities around our work and for longevity of collections a self-sustaining community is the key. Fostering and maintaining your community is about two-way engagement to ensure contribution benefits the participants, contributors and the volunteers as well as the institution. “… knowledge co-creation and exchange rather than simple knowledge transfer; a dialogue which enriches knowledge for mutual benefit”, “...community engagement is more than citizen participation… it would be questionable to describe it as community engagement, unless there have been some fully open opportunities for... collective involvement in the agenda under discussion” (Batt, 200911)
Be where your users are Online networks Physical spaces Developer Community: Use open software Project Community: Share experience with similar projects
According to a 2009 DEMOS report expertise can be recognised as not just a staple of the academic identity, “Knowledge is no longer restricted to the boundaries of universities and higher education facilities. These institutions no longer have a monopoly on where good ideas come from, nor how information and knowledge is used. They cannot control how the knowledge they create is used and where it is accessed”. This challenge happens on a number of levels. Digitisation standards and the physical environments the public use may not be comparable with professional work-practices, but even if one would not want to rely on this process for archiving extremely rare items, it may be ‘good enough’ and provide a large number of usable digital surrogates. It has been shown that large collections can be built this way for a fraction of the cost of other large scale digitisation projects, which means that projects which would otherwise not see the light may be able to run.