Crowdsourcing: the British Library experience
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The British Library has used crowdsourcing for several projects, including Sound Maps, the Georeferencer, and Convert-a-card. Their largest project was "In the Spotlight", which involved transcribing over 230,000 playbills. Lessons learned include designing projects carefully, managing internal impact, iterating after launch, focusing on user experience, planning workflows, communicating internally, supporting staff, investing in UX and tasks, engaging participants, measuring impact, and planning for the project end. Crowdsourcing allows cultural heritage institutions to engage the public, create learning opportunities, and contribute to shared goals regarding collections.
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Crowdsourcing: the British Library experience
- 1. Crowdsourcing: the British Library experience Dr. Mia Ridge, @mia_out Digital Curator, British Library The wisdom of the crowd? Crowdsourcing for information professionals Heritage Quay, University of Huddersfield, March 2018
- 2. Overview • About me • Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: what and why? • Crowdsourcing at the British Library • Lessons learnt • Questions
- 3. About me
- 5. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: what and why?
- 6. Asking the public to help with tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge. The activities and/or goals should be inherently rewarding. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/5786204856
- 7. Heritage crowdsourcing as volunteering https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/4659373140
- 8. Why ask the public to help?
- 9. 'For research, inspiration and enjoyment'
- 10. To create meaningful experiences with collections https://www.flickr.com/photos/george_eastman_house/2987740474/
- 11. http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/ To provide opportunities for learning
- 12. Crowdsourcing at the British Library
- 13. British Library Sound Maps Your accents http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/Your-Accents http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmap
- 15. Convert-a-card
- 16. Playbills 'In the Spotlight' Collection of over 230,000 printed sheets in 1,000 volumes Minimal cataloguing: 'A collection of playbills from miscellaneous Plymouth theatres 1796-1882' No information about individual playbills, performances, people
- 18. Tasks broken into 'microtasks'
- 19. Opportunities for engagement In the Spotlight
- 21. Project forum
- 22. Lessons learnt
- 23. Designing successful crowdsourcing projects • Project design – Manage internal impact – Plan to iterate after launch • User experience (interface, interaction) design – Onboarding, first task – Maintaining participation despite changes in motivation over time
- 24. Plan for ingest and workflow
- 25. Put work into internal comms
- 26. What support do staff need? https://www.flickr.com/photos/stockholmtransportmuseum_commons/8744070574
- 27. https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/5786204856 It takes work to be a good host
- 28. Invest in UX and task design
- 29. Put work into invitations
- 30. Getting instructions right is hard
- 31. Measuring impact (usefully) takes time
- 32. Turning curiosity into outreach Experimenting with working with participants to turn their stories into blog posts, newsletters
- 35. Plan for a graceful exit https://www.flickr.com/photos/fylkesarkiv/4545543824
- 36. Thanks for listening! Questions? In the Spotlight http://playbills.libcrowds.com/ @LibCrowds newsletter http://eepurl.com/btvBKT Dr. Mia Ridge, @mia_out Digital Curator, British Library
Editor's Notes
- A brief note for context... (This is the British Library, where I work as a digital curator, encouraging people to use 'western heritage' collections in digital scholarship and helping the library gain the skills and knowledge needed to understand the future of digital scholarship. As well as traditional academic scholarship, my work on crowdsourcing means I'm also interested in providing opportunities for people to learn and deepen skills in history, science, etc.
- Why am I here talking about this? I worked in social history and history of science museums for a long time, got interested in opportunity in the overlap between public engagement and need to enhance collections. Made crowdsourcing games for a research project in 2010, and as a result realised that a) games helped overcome fear of adding content in authoritative space, b) people looking at the objects became curious about them (when I could never convince them to visit the galleries). The screenshot on the left is an example of a microtask - tagging is a relatively quick task where you add words to describe on the item shown. During my PhD in digital history, I edited a book, Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage (2014). During my PhD I examined over 400 participatory history sites and used projects forum for trace ethnography.
- My definition is partly descriptive, and partly proscriptive (what it should be, as well as what it is). The benefit should be wider than your institution e.g. improving catalogue data helps any user of the catalogue as well as the institution. No financial rewards so has to be rewarding. Often task is quite enjoyable, and people are motivated by knowing their contribution helps make the world a better place.
- 'Online volunteering' is a good way of thinking about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. Contributors are looking for a meaningful leisure activity - some just want casual activities they can pick up whenever suits them, others want an opportunity to develop deeper skills and interests. The opportunity to socialise with other people with similar interests can turn into a strong motivation for continuing for some volunteers. If you've worked with in-person volunteer or community programmes, you already have a lot of the skills needed to run a good crowdsourcing project.
- Digitisation backlog: collections are big, resources are small. Manually enhancing collections records is expensive and time-consuming. Very few orgs have the resources for straight digitisation.
- Well-designed projects can help people discover new interests, communities, or just encourage them to have a brief moment of deeper engagement with cultural heritage. Will talk more about that later https://www.flickr.com/photos/george_eastman_house/2987740474/ George Eastman Museum St. Marks Place
- In this example, people transcribing faunal specimen sheets for started noticing the same handwriting on different cards, and began to wonder about the people behind the collections. They collected examples of their handwriting, and noted who was collecting when and where. They started to see relationships between collectors and began to compile biographies for them. Participants joined the project because they were interested in science, but they then become interested in the history of collecting and collectors. Important to note that they were supported by the site developer who could create new functions as their interests grew for e.g. maps of collecting locations. http://herbariaunited.org/wiki/Harry_Corbyn_Levinge or http://herbariaunited.org/wiki/Augustin_Ley
- The UK Soundmap, the first nationwide sound map, invited people to record the sounds of their environment, be it at home, work or play. Over 2,000 recordings were uploaded by some 350 contributors during the period July 2010 to July 2011. The 'Your accents' interactive map displays a collection of recordings created between November 2010 and April 2011 and is a result of the British Library exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. ... Contributors could either read a children’s story, Mr Tickle (© 1971 Roger Hargreaves), or a list of six words. Richard in earlier workshop said - had moderation because had to check for copyrighted material. E.g. of a) collecting new material and b) non-text, image material
- Project began 2011, launched 2012 (?). The right material meets the right audience. Beautiful objects, intriguing puzzle. There are a lot of map fans in the world and they were eager to interact with the BL's collection.
- Lots of the collection not yet in the digital catalogue. Type in text and try to match with WorldCat records.
- Problem - There are almost a quarter of a million (230,000) printed sheets bound into 1,000 volumes. Existing catalogue records provide minimal details and do not expand beyond naming a location (town), the year(s) covered, and sometimes the name of a particular theatre. No detail important to researchers: no titles of plays or performances; no names of actors, dramatis personae; no dates, or details of songs performed. Varied formats, not suitable for OCR or computational processing into structured data. Crowdsourcing some structured text seemed like the most realistic way of enhancing records and aiding discoverability.
- The smaller the task, the more likely it is that people will stay on and do more of them. First you mark the regions of the 'canvas', then type. One task per page.
- Also built in links to the project discussion forum... We're trying to have it both ways - we've reduced as many barriers to participation as we can (with the resources we have), and worked to make tasks as small and easy as we can so the tasks can be completed quickly, but we're also trying to encourage lots of discussion.
- If you click 'share', you're encouraged to share items on a forum thread especially set up for small moments of noticing something interesting.
- Built into the project...
- Two key stages in UX - convincing people to start and convincing people to stay
- Years! Unlike Trove where changes show up straight away.
- Years! Unlike Trove where changes show up straight away.
- If going to add to or change their roles, how can you support them in this?
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14592517038
- Lots of difficulties with defining a 'performance' as a huge variety of other kinds of acts, including acrobatics, fireworks, scientific demonstrations, tableaux, ballets...
- Years! Unlike Trove where changes show up straight away.
- Create a virtuous circle. https://www.flickr.com/photos/fylkesarkiv/4545523352/ Fylkesarkivet i Sogn og Fjordane "Slå på ring", Folkefjellet.
- With any luck, one day you will run out of content to crowdsource - what then? Where does your community go?