Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage

Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of mutually beneficial engagement with the collections and research of museums, libraries, archives and academia, it benefits both audiences and institutions. However, successful crowdsourcing projects reflect a commitment to developing effective interface and technical designs. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions devised the right combination of source material and the tasks for their ’crowd’. The authors provide theoretically informed, actionable insights on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, outlining the context in which their projects were created, the challenges and opportunities that informed decisions during implementation, and reflecting on the results. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.

Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of mutually beneficial engagement with the collections and research of museums, libraries, archives and academia, it benefits both audiences and institutions. However, successful crowdsourcing projects reflect a commitment to developing effective interface and technical designs. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions devised the right combination of source material and the tasks for their ’crowd’. The authors provide theoretically informed, actionable insights on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, outlining the context in which their projects were created, the challenges and opportunities that informed decisions during implementation, and reflecting on the results. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.

The central purpose of this collection of essays is to make a creative addition to the debates surrounding the cultural heritage domain. In the 21st century the world faces epochal changes which affect every part of society, including the arenas in which cultural heritage is made, held, collected, curated, exhibited, or simply exists. The book is about these changes; about the decentring of culture and cultural heritage away from institutional structures towards the individual; about the questions which the advent of digital technologies is demanding that we ask and answer in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage. Cultural heritage has enormous potential in terms of its contribution to improving the quality of life for people, understanding the past, assisting territorial cohesion, driving economic growth, opening up employment opportunities and supporting wider developments such as improvements in education and in artistic careers. Given that spectrum of possible benefits to society, the range of studies that follow here are intended to be a resource and stimulus to help inform not just professionals in the sector but all those with an interest in cultural heritage.

Cultural heritage communities of interest have increasingly expanded from cultural heritage professionals to volunteers, special interest groups and independent citizen-led initiative groups. Digital technology has also increasingly impacted cultural heritage by affording novel experiences of it – it features in a number of activities for all the aforementioned groups, as well as acting as support for visitors to cultural heritage centres. With different degrees of formality and training, these communities are increasingly defining and taking ownership of what is of value to them, thus reconfiguring the care, communication, interpretation and validation of heritage. Digital technology has played a crucial role in this transformative process. In a fully international context, cultural heritage practitioners, community champions and academics from different fields of study have contributed to this book. Each chapter brings to the fore the multiple relationships between heritage, communities and technologies as a focus of study and reflection in an inclusive way. Contributions touch upon present and future opportunities for technology, as well as participatory design processes with different stakeholders. This book brings together ideas from different disciplines, cultures, methods and goals, to inspire scholars and practitioners involved in community heritage projects.

This book provides an overview of various challenges and contemporary research activities in cultural heritage information focusing particularly on the cultural heritage content types, their characteristic and digitization challenges; cultural heritage content organization and access issues; users and usability as well as various policy and sustainability issues associated with digital cultural heritage information systems and services. Cultural Heritage Information, the first book in the peer-reviewed i-Research series, contains eleven chapters that have been contributed by seventeen leading academics from six countries. The book begins with an introductory chapter that provides a brief overview of the topic of digital cultural heritage information with the subsequent chapters addressing specific issues and research activities in this topic. The ordering of the chapters moves from scene setting on policies and infrastructures, through considerations of interaction, access and objects, through to concrete system implementations. The book concludes by looking forward to issues around sustainability, in the widest sense, that are necessary to think about in order to maximize the availability and longevity of our digital cultural heritage. The key topics covered are: - Managing digital cultural heritage information - Digital humanities and digital cultural heritage (alt-history and future directions) - Management of cultural heritage information: policies and practices - Cultural heritage information: artefacts and digitization technologies - Metadata in cultural contexts – from manga to digital archives in linked open data environment - Managing cultural heritage: information systems architecture - Cultural heritage information users and usability - A framework for classifying and comparing interactions in cultural heritage information systems - Semantic access and exploration in cultural heritage digital libraries - Supporting exploration and use of digital cultural heritage materials: the PATHS perspective - Cultural heritage information services: sustainability issues. Readership: This will be essential reading for researchers in Information Science specifically in the areas of digital libraries, digital humanities and digital culture. It will also be useful for practitioners and students in these areas who want to know the different research issues and challenges and learn how they have been handled in course of various research projects in these areas.

This edited collection brings together global experts to explore the role of information professionals in the transition from an analogue to a digital environment. The contributors, including David Nicholas, Valerie Johnson, Tim Gollins and Scott David, focus on the opportunities and challenges afforded by this new environment that is transforming the information landscape in ways that were scarcely imaginable a decade ago and is challenging the very existence of the traditional library and archive as more and more resources become available on line and as computers and supporting networks become more and more powerful. By drawing on examples of the impact of other new and emerging technologies on the information sciences in the past, the book emphasises that information systems have always been shaped by available technologies that have transformed the creation, capture, preservation and discovery of content. Key topics covered include: - Search in the digital environment - RDF and the semantic web - Crowd sourcing and engagement between institutions and individuals - Development of information management system - Security: managing online risk - Long term curation and preservation - Rights and the Commons Finding archived records in the digital age. Is Digital Different? illustrates the ways in which the digital environment has the potential to transform scholarship and break down barriers between the academy and the wider community, and draws out both the inherent challenges and the opportunities for information professionals globally. Readership: This book will be of particular to students, particularly those on information studies programs, and academics, researchers and archivists globally.

Academic Crowdsourcing in the Humanities lays the foundations for a theoretical framework to understand the value of crowdsourcing, an avenue that is increasingly becoming important to academia as the web transforms collaboration and communication and blurs institutional and professional boundaries. Crowdsourcing projects in the humanities have, for the most part, focused on the generation or enhancement of content in a variety of ways, leveraging the rich resources of knowledge, creativity, effort and interest among the public to contribute to academic discourse. This book explores methodologies, tactics and the "citizen science" involved. Addresses crowdsourcing for the humanities and cultural material Provides a systematic, academic analysis of crowdsourcing concepts and methodologies Situates crowdsourcing conceptually within the context of related concepts, such as ‘citizen science’, ‘wisdom of crowds’, and ‘public engagement’

The rise of digitisation and social media over the past decade has fostered the rise of participatory and DIY digital culture. Likewise, the archival community leveraged these new technologies, aiming to engage users and expand access to collections. This book examines the creation and development of participatory archives, its impact on archival theory, and present case studies of its real world application. Participatory Archives is divided into four sections with each focused on a particular aspect of participatory archives: social tagging and commenting; transcription; crowdfunding; and outreach & activist communities. Each section includes chapters summarizing the existing literature, a discussion of theoretical challenges and benefits, and a series of case studies. The case studies are written by a range of international practitioners and provide a wide range of examples in practice, whilst the remaining chapters are supplied by leading scholars from Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This book will be useful for students on archival studies programs, scholarly researchers in archival studies who could use the book to frame their own research projects, and practitioners who might be most interested in the case studies to see how participatory archives function in practice. The book may also be of interest to other library and information science students, and similar audiences within the broader cultural heritage institution fields of museums, libraries, and galleries.