crowdsourcing and cultural heritage collections
TRANSCRIPT
Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage Collections
Loren Fantin, OurDigitalWorld
Presentation to Archives and Special Collections Class Durham College, November 13, 2015
Agenda
Quick intro Community collections in action
** Ask questions anytime and/or contact me: [email protected]
OurDigitalWorld Discovery and access: ● Ourontario.ca ● News portals (ink.ourdigitalworld.org and
news.ourontario.ca) ● govdocs.ourontario.ca
• Digital collections management and hosting • Newspaper projects, project management, expertise
Our mission
Advocating digital cultural heritage as a public good: sharing, access, attribution, reuse.
Why? “open” cultural heritage collections
✓ We manage (create/collect) our collections in a networked environment – it is shared and distributed (“web-scaled”)
✓ “Our role is to be cultural stewards (not cultural hoarders).” [Tweet]
Act locally, think globally
Crowdsourcing
Libraries, Archives and Musuems (LAMs) and “Crowdsourcing”
• Opportunity to interact meaningfully with our collections
• Digital collections should be an exercise in community/civic engagement – contribute to public memory (building the “community” archive)
“Who is Harry Badger?”
h"p://images.ourontario.ca/Partners/hcma/HCMA0728281T.pdf
Making connections
Community
The User (Community) Experience • Digital objects are social assets – how can
the community interact? With the collections and with each other?
• Who is the community that you are trying to reach or represent?
• How can community knowledge be linked to the digital asset and become part of the metadata?
Public expectations and re-use
“People assume the right to co-opt and redistribute institutional content, not just to look at it. They seek opportunities for creative expression, both self-directed and in response to the media they consume. They want to be respected and responded to because of their unique interests. They crave the chance to be recognized by and connected to sympathetic communities around the world. These shifts will change the way that cultural institutions of all types, from museums to libraries to for-profit ‘experience vendors,’ do business.”
h"p://www.parBcipatorymuseum.org/imagining/
Questions?
Repurpose, re-use of data
Create once, use many times in different spaces requires: ✓ Smart data (structured, linked) and ✓ Data portability (export, crosswalks, permissions)
“Metadata is a love note to the future”
Christine Orr
Metadata = more options
Unique (Resource Identifier) (URI)
• As part of metadata, need a way to uniquely identify the resource • Needs to be identifiable outside of the context in which the record was created, as part of the web ecosystem • Essential component for linked open data
URLs (Semantic aka “Clean”)
“We strongly believe in the URL as interface. It’s nice to be able to read a URL and guess what it might bring back.”
h"p://collecBons.vam.ac.uk/informaBon/informaBon_apigeHngstarted
Platform (Tools)
• Cloud based or hosted? • Open source or proprietary? • Interactive options for community engagement? • Optimized for web discovery and devices (semantic web)? • Exportable options?
A real-life tale
Questions?
Crowdsourcing community collections in practice…
Cultural heritage collections contribute to public memory by building the “community” archive.
Crowdsourcing around those collections invites meaningful community and civic engagement.
Capturing community collections
• Analog scanning via digitization days • Web uploads of individual items • Curating community contributions • Comments • Transcriptions
Scanning day reveals local ghost
town!
“Community” archives
Photo by David Carson, [email protected]
Capturing community knowledge
• Comments
• Questions
• Crowdsourcing metadata via tools and transcriptions
Tagging
The “CiBzen”
TranscripBon
Questions?
Metadata capture from the crowd: form
Augmenting metadata
Transcription
✓ Metadata capture
• Capture as much data as you can at the moment
• Adhere to standards
• Use a template or form
• Enrich the metadata being captured
Terms and permissions
“Standard” permissions
Evolving rights framework
Flickr offering Creative Commons licensing since 2004 1) option of being able to tag an item as being
in the Public Domain 2) CC0 – waive copyright and place in the
public domain
✓ Permissions and Rights
• You need the correct set of rights at moment of contribution • Have options in your agreement • Either written permission or I agree checkmark • In plain language so contributor understands what they are agreeing to • Adhere to standards like Creative Commons
User-Contributed Content and “Local” Collections
Communities/Collaboration/Engagement
Collaboration and Engagement Benefits
• Achieve goals your organization couldn’t achieve on its own • Engage with the community in new ways • Use the expertise and knowledge of the “crowd” • Improve data – improve the quality, add
additional information, make it searchable • Allow community to engage with the collections
and each other in new ways
Creating “value”, cultural heritage is…
• Trusting • Participatory • Connections between collections (data) between collections and people between people around our collections • Sustainable
Resources A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections: http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/documents.php?view=
File naming: https://dmptool.org/dm_guidance#types
CDL Digital File Format Recommendations: http://www.cdlib.org/gateways/docs/cdl_dffr.pdf
Data Management: http://guides.library.ualberta.ca/content.php?pid=524929&sid=4389852
Linked Open Data – What is it? (Video): https://vimeo.com/36752317
Resources
Copyright FAQ: http://ourdigitalworld.org/services/resources/general-rules-for-canadian-copyright/
Open Content: A Practical Guide to Creative Commons: https://www.unesco.de/fileadmin/medien/Dokumente/Kommunikation/Open_Content_A_Practical_Guide_to_Using_Open_Content_Licences_web.pdf
Act locally, think globally
Better story
http://sarahwerner.net/blog/2015/07/how-to-destroy-special-collections-with-social-media/
