@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

From Cabinet to Internet

What next for your historical artefacts?

Enriched digital objects and where they might take us…

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

University of London Computer Centre

• Digital Archives & Research Technologies

– Ed Pinsent

– Steph Taylor

– Rory McNicholl

– Silvia Arango-Docio

– Tim Miles-Board

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

ULCC & the Linnean Society

• We have developed and hosted linnean-

online.org since 2007

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Our view of digitisaion

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Enriched for humans

• Readers– Human-readable content

– Accessibility

• Participants– Crowd-sourcing

– Annotation

– Community metadata

• Reader-participants– Come for the content, stay to add value (e.g. transcription)

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Enriched for machines

• Search engines

– Indexers / engines work better if you use

standards for metadata

• Harvesting services

– Amplification of your data across many

platforms, to wider audiences

• Publishing machine readable data and

metadata

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

What’s the best thing to do?

“The best thing to do with your data will be

thought of by someone else”

(Rufus Pollack, OKF)

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Taxonomy

http://www.vesper.org.uk/

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Taxonomy and location

http://www.vesper.org.uk/

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Correspondence

http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/

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Literature

http://litlong.edina.ac.uk/

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Story telling

http://storymap.knightlab.com/

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Paths to discovery

https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Open standards

Made possible because the data is

described and published using open

standards

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

But…

• My source data is

– Incoherent

– Difficult to process

• My metadata is

– Patchy and incomplete

– Possibly even wrong in places?

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Crowd sourcing

We will fix it!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/bagpuss/gallery, Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, Smallfilms

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Zooniverse – Snapshot Serengeti

http://www.snapshotserengeti.org/

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Transcriptorium project

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Crowd sourcing enriches

• Enriches source data

– Data collected is structured

– Uses open standards

– Very cheap

• Enriches the crowd

– Fun (especially if gamified)

– Educational

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Not a silver bullet

• This “free” resource comes at some cost

– Moderating the input (quality assurance)

– Maintaining the platform

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Thank you

Questions?