Crowdsourcing can be an effective way for cultural heritage institutions to engage the public by having them help with labor-intensive tasks like transcription. Examples where this has worked well include contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary, Wikipedia, transcription of over 47 million lines from Australian newspapers by local and family historians, and collection of over 1.5 million bird observations in one month by the eBird project. For crowdsourcing to be sustainable, interfaces need to be engaging; contributors need recognition; and crowdsourcing should be seen as part of a broader public engagement mission rather than just a single project.

1. 20th September 2011Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship Conference, New YorkCrowdsourcing as Public EngagementAlastair Dunning Digitisation Programme Manager

2. Crowdsourcing as Public Engagement@alastairdunninga.dunning (AT) jisc.ac.ukhttp://www.slideshare.net/xcia0069/crowdsourcing-as-public-engagement

3. JISC – Network, Services, Innovation, Includes Content (http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk)

4. imagine ten thousand members of the general public outside the entrance to your library ....

5. qualms? maybe. but you would not just dismiss them out of hand

6. this is crowdsourcing/community content.about how we engagepublic(s) with collections, research, onlineresources

7. contributions to the oxford english dictionaryhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/adventuresinlibrarianship/500218879/

8. wikipedia - a massive crowdsourcing project

10. Since 2008, Australian digitised newspapers invited transcriptions, very popular with local and family historians – 47,168,258 lines of c.3m pages of newspapers corrected

12. eBird since 2002 – 1.5m observations in one month!

15. World Archives Project - Commercial publishers involved in crowdsourcing as well 91,000contributors. 98.4 million records indexed

16. how do you engage publics in some of the academy’s most boring and labourious tasks?

20. engaging, slick interfaces, innovative games, and good communications will help exploitpublic(s) interest

21. exploit?

22. exploit?

23. do we want users exploited?

24. will they get bored?

25. how do we sustain their interest?“it will be essential to avoid developing intellectual capital from others’ resources without helping them to grow their cultural capital.”

26. hmm. what project do this?

27. volunteers have their own timescalessustaining that engagement via recognition

29. need to think of crowdsourcing as part of larger public engagement mission; not a single project but culturally embedded

30. universities, cultural heritage institutions, and other related bodies need to ...

31. increase numbers

32. raise awareness

33. inform, but listen and respond

34. get donations

35. create community cohesionthose ten thousand cataloguers are part of your broader remit. And maybe helpful for more than cataloguing

36. ReferencesJISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk) and portal to JISC Content (http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/)Trove – Australian Newspapers - http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspapereBird - http://ebird.org/Leaf Watch (Conkers) - http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/conker-tree-science-leaf-watch/id445371129?mt=8World Archives Project - http://community.ancestry.com/wapfold.it - http://fold.it/Digital Koot - http://www.digitalkoot.fi/enDigitisation, Curation and Two Way EngagementRunCoCo - http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/Great War Archive - http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en

37. Sources of Big NumbersWikipedia – Wikimedia Strategic Plan up to 2015, p 4-8Trove – Trove Statistics (as of 14th September 2011)eBird – About eBird (accessed 14th September 2011)World Archives Project – Public Tweet (14th September 2011)