Preliminary results of the Europeana task-force on UGC

1. UGC Task Force
First Results
1 Nov 2013, Digital Heritage 2013 conference, Marseille

2. The Task Force

3. Motivation
 Should the Europeana Network get involved in UGC content
facilitation in the face of the success of Europeana UGC
projects such as Europeana 1914-18?
 How could Europeana support the integration of UGC on a
network level?
 Which services and what kind of support serves our
audiences best?

4. Scope
 Investigating UGC activities within the GLAM community of
the Europeana Network and the approaches taken therein.
 Creating a basis for exploring the role UGC can play in the
context of Europeana.
 Recommendations as to whether the Europeana Network
actively should stimulate UGC projects as part of its activities
(e.g. encouraging cross-fertilization of ideas between
projects and identify duplication of effort)

5. Evaluation of UGC in the Europeana
network: Strategy
 Phase 1: Identifying actors within and beyond the network
• Very short questionnaire
• Who is using UGC, why, how and with how much success?
 Phase 2: The trials and tribulations of UGC
• Longer and detailed questions to the UGC actors identified in
Phase 1
 Phase 3: Understanding UGC in Europeana
• Detailed review of technology, organisation and impact

6. Phase 1

7. Phase 1
A survey on
experience with
participatory
projects within the
GLAM community
of the Network
and closely
associated
parties.

8. Analysis

9. Motivation

10. Survey participation

11. UGC experience
3 or more UGC projects

12. UGC challenges

13. Phase 2

14. Detailed questions (interview or
questionnaire)
First round:
4 partners
National Archives of Estonia
The House of Alijn (BE)
Jara, Institute for library development (SI)
Norwegian University of Life Sciences

15. National Archives of Estonia
The last and current project:
The genealogy project (parish books)
The places and names project
Two different user communities:
Expert user group (Members of the Genealogist Assoc.)
Public user group (predominantly Estonian population)
Tow different participation types:
Transcription of “personal books” (human error/typo)
Group verification (discussion / additional content)

16. National Archives of Estonia (2)
Questions of authorisation / provenance control
 The genealogists were all members and contributed through
their usual log-in
 The names/places project was advertised and collated
through Facebook, thus there was a certain kind of trace
The “Facebook” approach
 Transfer from Facebook to the archives very time-intensive
 Very lively discussions amongst participants
 Per item (name or place) to be identified or specified about
10 followers (group verification)

17. National Archives of Estonia (3)
 They are thinking of ways to involve more motivated (repeat)
users with a certain level of expertise by supplying them with
simple archiving tools (e.g. keywording)
 What they think would be of great benefit to many UGC
projects is an API that would support transfer of submitted
metadata to the individual archive structures.

18. The House of Alijn (BE)

19. The House of Alijn (BE)
 The Tagging-project (tag a museumcollection) had 2
subcollections selected to experiment with UGC.
 The first subcollection ‘Proud of my car’
www.huisvanalijn.be/collection/uit-het-fotoalbum-afl-4-trotsop-mijn-auto
 The second subcollection ‘Anonymous snapshots’ was a
collection of anonymous images (without any metadata) that
was published on our website.
http://www.huisvanalijn.be/collection/het-huis-van-alijn-zoekttaggers

20. The House of Alijn (2)
Project 1
 The tagging-project asked the public to add information to
the existing metadata (e.g. Type of car). In the exhibition
computers were available to tag or comment the images.
Unlabeled pictures were exposed next to labeled ones so the
lack of info was very clear.
Project 2
 This collection was not described by the museumstaff, so we
published the images (slides, photographs) without any
context information. Only an image + nummer.
 Online visitors were invited to tag the images with the
purpose of making the collection searchable.

21. The House of Alijn (3)
Getting users involved:
 we focussed on the auto-expert or -lovers. We looked for
blogs about cars, oldtimers en their communities.
 We promoted the project, called SUPERTAGGER, with a
logo, flyer and poster. We explained the goals of the project
via a press release and our museumblog + Facebook.

22. The House of Alijn (4)
 The flyertext was designed as a job description (“The
museum looking for online-assistents”).
 Training sessions: many visitors were unfamiliar with
'tagging'.
 A lot of interested visitors were of older age and unfamiliar
with computers but were eager to participate.
 In the first phase (Proud of my car) registration was required.
Taggers had to make a profile on www.huisvanalijn.be
 In het second phase (Supertagger) everybody could tag a
photo (as an anonymous user or registrated).

23. The House of Alijn (5)
Tools:
 The tagging tool was a Drupal module installed by our
website designer.
 An imported requirement was that we would be able to
measure the results, so user statistics were implemented.
Getting users involved:
 The 1st collection was linked to an exhibition, so we were
more confident that we could mobilize the public.
 The 2nd collection was only launched online and there was
no extisting expertgroup.

24. The House of Alijn (6)
Next:
 It would be helpful if tools were available on a larger scale. At
the moment, the House of Alijn runs a new UGC project
www.tijdvoor80.be in which we make use of free social
media platforms.
 We believe that the best is yet to come.
 Engaging the public to describe or tag a collection online is
in that way a logical extension of our daily work.

25. Jara, Institute for library development
 They organised 5 collection days in public libraries and
uploaded content to Europeana 1914-1918 web site.
 Events were highly appreciated by users and librarians.
 Based on these experiences, we decided to implement a
new module to our existing local cultural heritage web site
Kamra, called Album of Slovenia.
 Album is open to all users to upload their stories and was
launched in September 2013.

26. Jara, Institute for library development
(2)
Moderation / editing:
 A network of Kamra editors in 10 Slovenian regions
organising thematic events by inviting visitors to bring their
photos, documents etc. to the local library.




Librarians will help users to upload objects and stories.
ICT training for users in uploading content.
Each entry has to be confirmed by editors.
We edit the content to a certain level. We don’t interfere into
stories.

27. Jara, Institute for library development
(5)
 Networked aspects:
It would be good to decide on European level about the
minimum conditions to upload it to Europeana. Although we
regularly publish Kamra content on Europeana, we decided
not to do the same with content of Album – at least for some
time to see how it works.

28. Norwegian University of Life Sciences
 The project Akerselva Digitalt is a collaborative project
between the Norwegian Museum of Science, Technology
and Medicine and the Oslo Museum. This project
concentrated on developing mobile services for
communicating the city’s industrial history and explored a
variety of participatory design methods with youth and
community groups.
 The use of iPods and maps as cultural probes for placemaking, the use of Instagram for engaging followers with
archive photos, and will discuss the challenges faced when
working with young people in a project such as this..
 http://instagram.com/
 The project was part of a research project related to a
museum development project. the research project explored
methods of participant inclusion in distributed museum
contexts

29. Norwegian University of Life Sciences
(2)
 Authorisation through profile account on instagram
 Moderation: the entries were copied from online photo
databases - and the texts were modified and complemented
with additional information to fit Instragam users
 Editing: we worked a bit to find ways to hashtag the photos in
ways that both kept the museum profile - and fit with the
conventions of folksonomies on Instagram
 Assessment: there is big potential in UGC - but museums
have to explore these more closely to find good and relevant
solutions for UGC. Important would be to find a fit between
museums interest and the interests for users. UGC should
be framed as a collaborative project

30. Norwegian University of Life Sciences
(5)
 Integration of UGC content is timeconsuming on both sides;
in the production and on the integration into museum
communicational platforms.
 The Instagram project was part of a longer trajectory of 7
smaller participatory experiments - all in all we had a budget
of 150.000.- Nok??
 Scandinavia angle: Yes and no - I think the discussion in
scandinavia is more concerned about the democratic sides
and effects of these media - but I see several museums in
USA integrating part of user generated content in their
outreach programmes.

31. Phase 2
to be continued . . .

32. Thank you
Christine Sauter