Crowdsourcing cultural heritage collections allows institutions to meaningfully engage with communities around those collections. It contributes to building a shared public memory. Loren Fantin discusses how OurDigitalWorld partners with institutions to crowdsource annotations, metadata, transcriptions and digital objects from local communities. This enhances collections by adding community knowledge and perspectives. Guidelines discussed include using open standards and licenses, uniquely identifying objects, and establishing clear terms for user-generated content. The goal is participatory and trust-based cultural stewardship.

1. Crowdsourcing and Cultural
Heritage Collections
Loren Fantin, OurDigitalWorld
Presentation to Archives and Special Collections Class
Durham College, November 13, 2015

2. Agenda
Quick intro
Community collections in action
** Ask questions anytime and/or contact me:
lfantin@ourdigitalworld.org

3. 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

4. Our mission
Advocating digital cultural heritage as a public
good: sharing, access, attribution, reuse.

5. 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]

6. Act locally, think globally

7. Crowdsourcing

10. 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)

11. “Who is Harry Badger?”
h"p://images.ourontario.ca/Partners/hcma/HCMA0728281T.pdf

12. Making connections

13. Community

14. 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?

15. 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/

16. Questions?

17. Repurpose, re-use of data
Create once, use many times in different spaces
requires:
✓ Smart data (structured, linked)
and
✓ Data portability (export, crosswalks,
permissions)

18. “Metadata is a love note to the future”
Christine Orr

19. Metadata = more options

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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?

23. A real-life tale

24. Questions?

25. 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.

26. Capturing community collections
• Analog scanning via digitization days
• Web uploads of individual items
• Curating community contributions
• Comments
• Transcriptions

27. Scanning day reveals local ghost
town!

29. “Community”
archives

30. Photo by David Carson, dcarson@post-dispatch.com

31. Capturing community knowledge
• Comments
• Questions
• Crowdsourcing metadata via tools and
transcriptions

33. Tagging

34. The
“CiBzen”

35. TranscripBon

36. Questions?

37. Metadata capture from the crowd: form

38. Augmenting metadata

39. Transcription

40. ✓ 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

41. Terms and permissions

42. “Standard” permissions

43. 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

44. ✓ 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

45. User-Contributed Content and “Local”
Collections

46. Communities/Collaboration/Engagement

47. 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

48. Creating “value”, cultural heritage is…
• Trusting
• Participatory
• Connections
between collections (data)
between collections and people
between people around our collections
• Sustainable

49. 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

50. 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

51. Act locally, think globally

52. Better story
http://sarahwerner.net/blog/2015/07/how-to-
destroy-special-collections-with-social-media/

53. ourdigitalworld.org
@ODWorg
odw@ourdigitalworld.org
we are also on Facebook
Thank you!