This document summarizes a crowdsourcing project called Purposeful Gaming that uses online games to improve optical character recognition (OCR) in texts within the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). It describes how games like Smorball and Beanstalk engage the public to transcribe and correct inaccurate OCR text, thereby enhancing discovery and access to BHL's digital texts. Multiple player confirmations of a word are taken as correct, added to the index, and made searchable. The goal is to improve OCR for materials that are difficult to digitize like seed catalogs, notebooks, and handwritten texts.

1. Purposeful Gaming:
Crowdsourcing the Correction of
OCRed Text in the
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Marty Schlabach
Food & Agriculture Librarian
Mann Library
Cornell University
Upstate NY Science Librarians
Annual Meeting
Cornell University
October 23, 2015

3. BHL Members
• American Museum of Natural
History Library
• Comisión Nacional para el
Conocimiento y Usa de la
Biodiversidad (CONABIO)
• Cornell University Library
• Field Museum of Natural History
Library
• Harvard University Botany
Libraries
• Harvard University, Museum of
Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr
Library
• Library of Congress
• LuEsther T. Mertz Library, The New
York Botanical Garden
• Marine Biological Laboratory /
Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution Library
• Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter
H. Raven Library
• National Library Board, Singapore
• Natural History Museum Library,
London
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,
Library, Art & Archives
• Smithsonian Libraries
• United States Geological Survey
Libraries Program
• University Library, University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign

4. • National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to
Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis.
• Partners include Harvard, New York Botanical Garden,
Cornell
• Runs Dec 2013-Nov 2015
• Funded in part by IMLS
Purposeful Gaming and BHL:
engaging the public in improving & enhancing
discovery & access to digital texts

5. BHL Problem Statement:
• Major challenge for digital libraries:
• full-text searching of scanned texts is
significantly hampered by poor output from
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
• Historic literature has proven to be particularly
problematic because of its tendency to have
• varying fonts
• varying typesetting
• varying layouts
• ink bleed-through
• foxing
• other physical condition issues

7. • Building an online game to crowdsource the correction of
inaccurate OCR
• Crowdsourcing the transcription of inaccurate OCR and
handwritten texts
• Adding new content types upon which to test the approach
• Seed & Nursery Catalogs & Seed Exchange Lists
• Test OCR correction on this content type
• Crowd-source the transcription when needed
• Field Notebooks,
• Handwritten, OCR virtually impossible
• Crowd-source the transcription
How are we engaging the public in
improving and enhancing the discovery and access to
digital texts in BHL?

9. Beanstalk

16. • Smorball
1353 sessions
1081 players
• Beanstalk
991 sessions
829 players
Amount of Game-Playing?

17. What happens with the game output?
• Multiple players enter the same character string for a
word, system considers it correct
• String of characters or the correct word is added to the
index
• Made available for searching & improves discoverability

18. Thanks to my colleagues at:
• Mann Library, Cornell University
• Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden
• Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden
• National Agriculture Library, USDA
• Institute for Museum and Library Services
• Tiltfactor

19. Questions??