The National Library of Wales sought to develop a customizable, bilingual crowdsourcing platform to capture volunteer contributions for digitized collections. Key requirements for the platform included compatibility with IIIF and web annotations, support for multiple languages and projects from a single codebase, and an easy to use CMS. The library selected Digirati to build the platform using Omeka S and various modules to handle features like annotations, controlled vocabularies, and customizable capture models. The resulting crowd.library.wales site launched with several initial projects and collections. The library aims to integrate crowdsourced outputs with other projects and make the platform available for other cultural heritage organizations.

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Crowd Wales
Building a crowdsourcing platform for Wales
Paul McCann
Digital Research Projects Manager
The National Library of Wales

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Community projects

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The Welsh Book of Remembrance
Mirador Frontend
Simple Annotation
Server Backend
Modified input UI
to capture rank,
regiment, location,
etc

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Crowd Wales
Requirements
● IIIF Compatible
● W3c Web Annotation compatible
● Multilingual (Bilingual as a minimum)
● Easy ‘CMS’ for non technical people to use, manage and create projects
● Multiple projects from a single code base
● Open Source and easily re-deployable
Tender process
“The proposal is to develop and implement a customisable, bilingual platform, which can be
enhanced in the future and offered to other organisations who may wish to deliver digital
crowdsourcing projects. We expect that the availability of a crowdsourcing system built using
open standards, namely IIIF and Web Annotations, will be of interest to a wide range of
international organisations and also other cultural heritage organisations in Wales.”

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Tender requirements
Administrators should be able to:
● Add content (import IIIF manifests)
● Define the look and feel of the site
● Decide what info should be captured by the volunteers and with what tasks.
NLW Collection types:
● Photographic
● Semi-structured data, e.g. Forms
● Tabular
● Free text
Support for:
● Panning and zooming
● Image rotation
● Paged / sequenced images
Users should be able to log in with:
● Social media accounts
● Library readers ticket

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Volunteer customisability
One or more volunteer tasks per site/project
Tasks:
● Tagging
● Transcribing
● Markup / commentary
Specifics for tasks:
● What fields are collected
● What the fields are called
● How data is input in a field
● Controlled lists of vocabulary

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Task makeup
Selection:
● Whole image
● Regions of images
Multiple inputs per selection
Input types:
● Free text
● Controlled list
● Lookup - external list/API (wikidata, LC Subject headings)
● Map dropper
● Date Selector

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Digirati
Omeka S:
● Native JSON-LD
● Built in tools for working with Linked Open Data
● APIs that fit well with W3C Web Annotation Model, and IIIF
● Existing Digirati IIIF modules
Concentrate on those features unique to NLW:
● Crowd-sourcing
● Annotations

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Omeka Modules
Annotation Studio Module - Omeka module for configuring
and adding the annotation studio to Omeka installs
IIIF Import Module - Module for importing IIIF Collections as
Item Sets, and IIIF manifests as Items in Omeka
IIIF View Module - Module for viewing IIIF collections,
manifests and canvases on Omeka sites
Public User Module - module to allow public user
registrations and logins
NLW Frontend Module - helpers, blocks and hooks specific
to the National Library of Wales
OAuth Module - Twitter, Facebook and other OAuth
implementations to allow single sign on in Omeka
Elucidate Module - Elucidate integration with support for
W3C Web Annotation Protocol and Data Model.
Elucidate Proxy Module - Elucidate proxy, pluggable
extensions to Elucidate, for example, decorating annotations
with user details.
Digirati Vocabulary - Module to import vocabulary and
create resource templates to support capture models
Shibboleth Module - Shibboleth SSO integration.
Internationalisation Module - Support for multi-lingual single
Omeka sites with Transifex integration.
Capture Model Import Module - Import Capture Models from
JSON-LD.
Google Analytics Module - Adds google analytics tracking to
Omeka-S

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Capture Model
A Capture model consists of the following
1, Data Model
2, UI
3, Serialisation

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Data Model - single field
Data Model
label for the type of thing we want to capture,
e.g. ‘Your Comment’.
Description of the type of thing we want to
capture, or some context sensitive help.
Range of possible values that can be captured,
e.g. rdfs:literal.
The linked data vocabulary property or class it
conforms to,
e.g. dcterms:description.
UI
Display - Text Box
Display - Selector
Serialise
Serialised as a W3C web annotation.
–Type
–Class
–Language
–Format
–Target
–Purpose / Motivation,
e.g. commenting, classifying, etc.

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Resource Templates
Resource Templates:
● Accessible as JSON-LD
● Can describe individual Items, or groups
of items (Omeka Item Sets)
● Provide forms for editing/creating Omeka
Items and Item Sets
Digirati created 2 Resource Templates:
● Crowd Source Element (for individual
‘Fields’ e.g. ‘Title’)
● Crowd Source Group (for groups of
fields, e.g. an entire form, or group of
forms)

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crowd.library.wales

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Looking forward
More projects and collections lined up.
Looking to join up our crowdsourcing outputs with our wikiData projects.
Actively looking to work with others, particularly where we can bring multiple collections together into one
platform. We can provide an end to end service in house, from digitisation through IIIF presentation,to
project setup and content model design and testing with our team of volunteers.
Working on an end to end born digital workflow, built upon the digital preservation infrastructure and
knowledge at NLW, incorporating Archivematica, giving small reposittories in Wales an opportunity to see
the benefits of IIIF, and crowdsourcing.

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The End
Questions?
Contact Me
paul.mccann@llgc.org.uk

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Panel Questions – data!
●What is your purpose for the data after its been crowdsourced. Is it benefitting or enhancing an existing
catalog or is it being made available as a standalone dataset?
●How do you keep keen volunteers ‘The crowd’ happy when it can sometimes take a while for their inputs
to be seen or used in some way, and to put a value on their work in their eyes?
●How do you manage displaying user generated content, alongside authoritive content, that may have
been created by cataloguers or archivists and keep a clear distinction between the two.