Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage

Citation

Kay Neville (2015), "Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage", Online Information Review, Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 588-589. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2015-0166

This very original and topical book examines the theory and practice of crowdsourcing and describes many new innovative and fascinating projects developed by museums, galleries and archives. Crowdsourcing is a process whereby the general public helps contribute to shared goals by assisting in the digitising of data, and the Internet has opened up new avenues for the public to participate in scientific and cultural projects.

The book is divided into two sections: Part 1 consists of eight case studies from important cultural heritage and academic institutions, whilst Part 2 discusses challenges and opportunities and the wider implications of cultural crowdsourcing. Data enhancement has been the most popular form of crowdsourcing, where the public can help transcribe, tag and correct errors in data and helps museums and cultural organisations to open up their collections. Identification of unknown objects and people in historic photos and “help us” sites allow the general public to share their knowledge.

Editor Mia Ridge has experience as a business analyst, digital consultant and web programmer in cultural heritage and commercial areas in the UK and Australia. The chapter authors are experts from a variety of areas in the digital humanities, archival theory and practice, museum studies, digital archives, museum digital marketing and digital enhancement. They contribute a variety of viewpoints and fresh ideas to engage museum patrons using digital tools and resources that have been created and enhanced using crowdsourcing techniques.

The New York Public Library has several web-based crowdsourcing projects, including the successful What’s on the Menu? project that involved 9,000 digitised historic restaurant menus that was turned into a popular searchable database. Old Weather (www.oldweather.org) is a crowdsourcing project that uses historical weather observations from old ships logs to record past weather patterns by asking the public to transcribe handwritten Royal Navy ships’ logs.

Crowdsourcing has many advantages, such as saving the time and cost of paid professional staff for data entry and error correction. Often it is a dedicated small team of volunteers with an interest in the particular project that does most of the work. It helps improve and create access to resources previously hidden from the public whilst encouraging a sense of public ownership of cultural resources. In the final chapter Trevor Owens discusses the philosophical, psychological and technical framework and the important issues of ensuring that crowdsourcing is compatible with the values of the organisation. He believes that crowdsourcing can be a valuable experience and can help engaged members of the public to contribute to public memory and add value to cultural collections.

This book is very readable and outlines many interesting and important projects along with considerations and potential problems such as managing and training participants and selecting appropriate technology platforms. This book will assist academics, librarians and museum staff to create crowdsourcing projects whilst also providing examples of the challenges and benefits. I would recommend it to any public organization with documents, photographs or other archival material that requires classification and tagging to allow them to share their resources with a wider audience.