Lori Birrell is a Simmons GSLIS 2011 graduate who has kindly allowed SCoSAA to feature her recap of the SAA 2012 session called Crowdsourcing Our Collections: Three Case Studies of User Participation in Metadata Creation and Enhancement. Lori is working as a Manuscript Librarian at the University of Rochester Rush Rhees Library and is an avid blogger. She writes about social media in archives and libraries, conferences she attends, and her experiences as a new library professional. Please support her endeavors by reading and following her blog at lori.birrell.us.
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This morning I went to the crowd sourcing session. This has been my favorite session by far, at SAA this year. I find sessions that offer tangible tools and workflow suggestions the best.
Most relevant for me, were two transcription projects- one from NARA and the other from the University of Iowa. NARA has initiated a crowd sourcing pilot project. They digitized and made available about 3,000 pages of historical documents ranging in topic and time period. They divided those documents into a color coded system to indicate beginner, intermediate, and advanced transcription difficulty. The difficult documents were hard to read either because of the scanning quality (for docs that had been scanned a long time ago), or because of the nature of the handwriting. The user chooses the page he or she wants to work on and then that page is blocked to other users, so it?s not being edited by multiple users at the same time. Entered in a free text box, the user can add annotations, indicate difficult words, etc. Meredith Stewart, the speaker hopes to add a ?crowd sourcing review? process to increase the level of participation among the user community.
Greg Prickman from the University of Iowa started his project by digitizing all of their civil war diaries and letters in 2009-2010 to prepare for the sesquicentennial. They then decided to open up these documents up to crowd sourcing. Using ContentDM, they had their users enter their transcriptions is an accompanying email form. Their transcriptions are then sent to an email inbox, which is checked by a Special Collections staff member and then checked for accuracy and then uploaded. Their efforts went viral and they?re now working on a new project to scan and upload all of their 17th- 20th century manuscript cookbooks. They?ll be using the new transcription product, Scripto for this new project.
Neither of these projects require the user to log in to begin transcribing. I think that decision directly impacted the amount of participation the project managers observed during the course of their projects.
This winter I hope to begin a crowd sourcing transcription project in Omeka and I found this session particularly valuable in helping me to think of how this project can ensure wide participation.