from cabinet to internet 2015
TRANSCRIPT
@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
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
Open standards
Made possible because the data is
described and published using open
standards
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But…
• My source data is
– Incoherent
– Difficult to process
• My metadata is
– Patchy and incomplete
– Possibly even wrong in places?
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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
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