Digital History workshop: Crowdsourcing in the Humanities and cultural heritage sector. Victoria University of Wellington 23 April 2013 Session: Crowdsourcing or bust (The Indexer, Archives New Zealand) Presenter: Tracie Almond http://wtap.vuw.ac.nz/wordpress/digital-history/events/crowdsourcing-workshop/presenters/

1. Crowdsourcing or Bust
Archives NZ’s ‘The Indexer’
Tracie Almond
23 April 2013

2. What is The Indexer?
• A crowd-sourcing tool for ‘virtual
volunteers’ to transcribe the contents of
indexes from scanned images.

3. Archives NZ’s Project Objective
• Improve the findability of archives that rely
on secondary finding aids (e.g. name
indexes).
Supporting the long term vision that:
• We have a single, integrated set of
finding aids available online for public
use.

4. Problems we’re trying to solve
• Current search tools do not find some archives
well due to the archives being described at a
fairly lumpy level.
• Names, places and other useful information are
often only in indexes, etc. The indexes are often
in paper form, so only available in our offices.
• We are not serving our researchers as well as
we could if we had that material incorporated
into our online search tools.
• We can then link to digital copies of the archive
and reduce the need for people to visit our
offices.

5. Archives NZ has about
1 million entries
it would like to capture –
like these ...

6. Class List – YCAF 4135 (example of Single entry type)

7. Hospital Index (example of Single entry type)

8. Auckland Hospital Charitable Aid – Application for Relief
(example of Single & Multiple entry type)

9. BBCB 4243 Māori
Succession Register
(example of Multiple entry
type)

10. The Indexer

14. Project benefits
• High priority secondary finding aids will be
accessible to our search engines.
• Archives NZ will have the infrastructure
needed to capture and make available
many of the other high priority secondary
finding aids.
• We will increase our pool of volunteers
and community involvement by providing
online tools.

15. Lessons learned
• Do your research – others have gone
before and can provide great advice
• Use a professional interface designer –
it doesn’t cost much more to make it look
nice and be a good user experience
• Plan for openness – use authorities,
make an API, open source the software
(easier to do if you plan it in)

16. Do your research
• Try out the other projects out there already
– see what you do and don’t like
• Talk to those who’ve done it – get their
advice
• Read up on the science behind it

17. Use a professional interface
designer
• It doesn’t cost much – less than $6k for
The Indexer (including usability testing)
• Test on users at the design stage and
again before release
• Result is tailored to the tasks but still clean

18. Plan for Openness
• Can you use a metadata standard?
• Can you adopt widely used name or place
authorities?
• Can you make an API to share the data?
• Can you open source your software?