what's welsh for crowdsourcing?: citizen science at the national library of wales
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What’s Welsh for Crowdsourcing?: Citizen Science at the National Library of WalesProf Lorna Hughes@lornamhughes
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Digital Collections and the National Library of Wales
• Digitisation supports: • Access to Welsh and Celtic
materials by global audience• Preservation• Collections enhancement and
reunification• Transformation of scholarship• Community engagement
• A cohesive, national collection• Underlying principle: free
access to digital content• www.llgc.org.uk
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The National Digital Library of Wales
• A cohesive, national collection, with an underlying principle of free access to digital content
• Based on internal expertise/capacity in the entire digital lifecycle: selection, conservation, capture, management and preservation
• Copyright and other intellectual property rights cleared as a managed part of digitisation process:
– Where material is on deposit and/or the current rights holders are known, permission is requested: where declined, materials are not used; when current rights holder is unknown, reasonable efforts are made to identify and/or contact the rights holder
• Digitised resources licensed for re-use and re-purposing under an openlicense (BY-NC-SA): Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Sharealike license
• Fee access is key to realising the potential community, social, researchand economic benefits of digitised resources
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NLW Research Programme in Digital Collections
UNDERSTANDING USE
Understand use of existing digital content
ENHANCING CONTENT
Identify ways of making existing digital content more useful for
research, teaching or community
engagement
DEVELOPING NEW DIGITAL CONTENT
develop new digital content that addresses
specific research or education needs, in
partnership with academics and other
key stakeholders
Bringing Digital Humanities to the Digital Library: llgc.org.uk/research
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Research Programme in Digital Collections: Implementation
A collaborative research programme
• Around existing and emerging digital resources
• Engagement with academic communities, nationally and internationally, and existing and emerging communities of practice in Digital Humanities
• A focus for digital humanities in Wales
Building sustainable digital resources that have an impact on scholarship
• Develop strategic digitization initiatives addressing specific research needs
• Foster interoperability and re-use of collections
• Increasing value and impact of digital collections through use for research
Fostering engagement with the public
• Education, training and culture around NLW collections
• Knowledge exchange: digitization, digital asset management and use
Activities
• Research on digital collections development, use and discovery
• Project development, obtaining funding, developing new initiatives
• Collaborations with partners in Wales and beyond
• Outreach, dissemination and publications
• 4 x PhD students in collaboration with Universities in Wales
Develop an understanding of the use, value and impact of digital collections:
for research, education and public engagement
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Crowdsourcing at NLW
• NLW has a strong tradition of working with volunteers: Archives and Records Association (ARA) fosters links links between repositories and user communities
• Volunteering, community participation and social inclusion on–going priorities in NLW and Welsh Government agendas
• Co-operation with the crowd enables the Library to reach a wider audience of engaged users
• Libraries and other cultural heritage organisations face unprecedented budget cuts, fiscal austerity
• Increased increased opportunities for interaction between users and professionals.
• Encourage a sense of public ownership and responsibility to cultural heritage collections
Crowdsourcing helps achieve goals that would otherwise be impossible due to lack of time, finances and resources, adding to or enriching digital content
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Models of crowdsourcing projects in libraries, archives and museums
• Tasks relating to correction and transcriptionUsers correct and / or transcribe the products of digitisation processes• ContextualisationAdding further information about the context of a resource, e.g. by writing or collecting oral evidence about a resource• Adding to a collectionLooking for additional resources that can be included in an exhibition (physical or virtual) or a collection• ClassificationCollecting descriptive metadata about resources in a collection. A common example would be social tagging.• Co-curationUsing the inspiration / expertise non-professional curators to create (physical or virtual) exhibitions
• Based on work by Oomen & Aroyo (2011).
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Cymru 1900 / Wales 1900
Developing a a gazetteer of Welsh place names from OS 6 inch maps using a platform developed by Galaxy Zoo – launched October 2013
Crowdsourcing
Sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call: e.g., to help capture, systematize or analyse large amounts of data (“citizen science”)
cymru1900wales.org
@cymru1900wales
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Integrating crowdsourcing methods for archival transcription
• Welsh Wills Online Developing transcriptions
and search interface for Welsh wills at NLW
• Extensive scoping of community
transcription of historical records
• Investigating feasibility of crowdsourcing
through workshops and testing
• Creating “Targetted crowdsourcing” working
with archivists, family and local historians,
and other experts
• Developing markup of content for
representation and analysis with users
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‘The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather’
Building new collaborations & partnerships around digital research: Eira.llgc.org.uk
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Rhyfel Byd a’r profiad Cymreig
Welsh experience of World War One
cymruww1.llgc.org.uk (Project Blog)
@CymruWW1
www.cymru1914.org
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Community generated contentPeople’s Collection Wales Workshops for Cymru1914.org
http://cymruww1.llgc.org.uk/2013/08/08/947/
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Wales at War: Crowdsourcing war memorial data in Wales
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Successful Implementation of Library Crowdsourcing Projects
• Managing the overall quality and accuracy of contribution
• Managing copyright and intellectual property rights
• Overcoming issues of ‘trust’
• Planning the technological approach to be used: there is no ‘one size fits all’ tool for all the different types of project
• Managing, supporting and engaging with ‘the crowd’ as an on–going process
• Volunteer efforts should be acknowledged and rewarded through public recognition, or emphasising their potential impact on scholarly endeavour
• Overcoming these challenges is the key to successful projects.
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Resources required
• Crowdsourcing does not require fewer resources!:
• Careful planning of the project from the start• Creation of communities of interest around a specific project or
task• Support for those communities until the tasks are completed• Managing those who can contribute• Training individuals for very specific tasks within a project• Evaluating, moderating and editing contributions • Selecting and implementing suitable technology platforms; and,• Developing specific Library workflows to manage contributions,
integrating them into the Library's existing workflows
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Cyfrannu torfol
• Cyfrannu torfol, ‘contribution of mass’ or ‘collective contributions’
• Consistent with concepts of collectivism, mass digitisation• Crowdsourcing utilises the multiple perspectives of the crowd:
– Guiding idea: the capability of ‘the crowd’, based on collective intelligence, collaboration and the aggregation of knowledge, is often better than that of the individual
• Crowdsourcing uses social engagement methods to achieve focussed, shared, large goals not achievable without a collective approach
• Enables transformation of immersive interaction with Library collections, encouraging the public to collaborate in the production of new knowledge around Library collections.
• Allows Libraries to build new relationships with their audiences, adding value to their collections and the organisation as a whole.
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Reference:
• ‘What’s Welsh for Crowdsourcing? Citizen Science and Community Engagement at the National Library of Wales’, Lyn Dafis, Lorna Hughes, Rhian James, in Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, Ed. Mia Ridge, Ashgate, 2014
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Thank you!
Prof Lorna Hughes@lornamhughes