ukad 2011

Crowds & CommunitiesUser Participation in the Archives
Alexandra Eveleigh
UKAD Archives Discovery Forum
The National Archives
3 March 2011

What is ‘User Participation’?
Image: Online Communities 2 (2010) http://xkcd.com/802/

What is ‘User Participation’?

User Participation (a working definition):
Designed to make use of users’ skills, knowledge or creativity
User-focused, perhaps user-led
Reciprocal
Online
Focused upon description & resource discovery (metadata creation & re-use)

Postmodernist Utopia or Professionalism At Risk?
Cartoon: Peter Steiner, The New Yorker (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20), 5 July 1993

Serious Leisure: Amateurs or Experts?
“I hope there always will be, room for the Amateur, and in large numbers…the Local Official or other enthusiast whose Archives do not need and cannot claim the whole of his time; but who can find enough to undertake their listing or repair or photographing and wishes to acquire, within those limits, something of a professional technique.”
Hilary Jenkinson, October 1947.
Inaugural lecture for a new course in Archive
Administration at University College London.

Communities: Volunteers and Professionals

Revolution or Evolution in Archival Practice and Professionalism?
Crowds or communities - is user participation a new phenomenon, or similar to previous outreach and volunteering initiatives?
Do user participation initiatives really attract ‘new’ users or do current design models effectively limit the participant pool to existing ‘experts’?
What are the implications of collaboratively authored descriptions for archival authority and control?
What role does the professional archivist have to play in the moderation of user-contributed metadata?

What motivates participation?
What are the optimal frameworks for participation?
How can systems be designed to motivate and reward contributions?
How effective are contribution rate statistics as a motivational tool?
Do contributors value acknowledgement?
Is competition ‘healthy’ as a means to motivate contribution?

‘Crowdsourcing’
Extended control
Predefined tasks
Project-based
Wide range of potential participants
Quantitative incentive mechanisms
Gaps & errors highlighted

Crowds & Communities(Adapted from Haythornthwaite, 2009)
Communities
Crowds
Specialist knowledge or skills (novice to expert)
Sustained commitment
Intrinsically motivated
Group norms; social rewards
Attribution & reputation
Shared responsibility for product & process
Open membership: low barriers to entry
Dip-in, dip-out
Extrinsically motivated
Granular task, predefined by external authority
Anonymous
Quantitative recognition mechanisms eg contribution rate

Alexandra Eveleigh
alexandra.eveleigh.09@ucl.ac.uk
@ammeveleigh
http://80gb.wordpress.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/-bast-/349497988/

List of Examples
Ancestry World Archives Project - http://community.ancestry.co.uk/wap/download.aspx
Exploring Surrey's Past - http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/
Family Search Indexing - http://indexing.familysearch.org/
flickr Commons - http://www.flickr.com/commons/
FromThePage - http://beta.fromthepage.com/
Living the Poor Life - http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/living-poor-life.htm
Militieregisters - http://militieregisters.nl/
My Brighton and Hove - http://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/
Old Weather - http://www.oldweather.org/
Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections - http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/
Revisiting Archives – available from http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/
The Visible Archive - http://visiblearchive.blogspot.com/
Transcribe Bentham - http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/Transcribe_Bentham
Waisda - http://waisda.nl/
Your Archives - http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk

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