Resources for ‘Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions’

A collection of links for further reading for the British Library's Digital Scholarship course on 'Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions'. Last updated June 2016.

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.

Crowdsourcing projects discussed

• OED Appeals
• Games with a purpose (now blog only)
• ReCAPTCHA
• Trove
• FamilySearch indexing
• DigitalKoot (now complete)
• Transcribe Bentham
• Old Weather
• Operation War Diary
• What's on the menu
• Historypin
• Art UK Tagger
• 10 Most Wanted
• Reading Experience Database
• British Library Georeferencer
• British Library Sound Maps
• (Mostly Museum) Metadata Games
• Tiltfactor's Metadata Games

Other relevant crowdsourcing projects

• Waisda? (an example of tagging audio-visual content through games; in Dutch)
• BBC World Service Radio Archive (tagging audio content; prototype)
• Snapshot Serengeti (identifying animals)
• The US National Archives 'Citizen Archivist' dashboard

Crowdsourcing review exercise links

https://www.openobjects.org.uk/2014/10/looking-for-crowdsourcing-love-in-all-the-right-places/

Or for international projects: Crowdsourcing the world’s heritage

There are additional discussion questions and notes for reviewing sites on another post on 'NITLE ‘Crowdsourcing’ seminar'.

Additional exercises listed on Exercises for ‘The basics of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage’ are 'compare front pages' and 'lessons from game design'.

Useful blogs

• Collaborative Manuscript Transcription blog
• Rose Holley's blog
• The Zooniverse citizen science blog
• Open Objects (my blog)

References

These are showing their age but they're still a good starting point.

History of crowdsourcing

• Gilliver, Peter. 2012. '‘Your dictionary needs you’: a brief history of the OED’s appeals to the public'. Oxford English Dictionary website.
• Howe, Jeff. 2006, 'The Rise of Crowdsourcing', Wired.
• Millikan, Frank Rives. 2012. ‘Joseph Henry: Father of Weather Service’. The Joseph Henry Papers Project, Smithsonian Institution Archives. Accessed October 28. http://siarchives.si.edu/history/jhp/joseph03.htm.

Motivations and other background

• Clary, E. Gil, Mark Snyder, Robert D Ridge, John Copeland, Arthur A Stukas, Julie Haugen, and Peter Miene. 1998. “Understanding and Assessing the Motivations of Volunteers: a Functional Approach.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (6) (June): 1516–30.
• Shirky, Clay. (2011). Cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age. London, Penguin.

Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and the humanities

• Alam, Sultana Lubna, and John Campbell. 2012. “Crowdsourcing Motivations in a Not-for-profit GLAM Context : the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program.” ACIS 2012 : Location, Location, Location : Proceedings of the 23rd Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2012 (November 8): 1–11.
• Bruno, Elena. 2011. ‘Smithsonian Crowdsourcing Since 1849!’ Smithsonian Institution Archives. April 14. http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-crowdsourcing-1849.
• Dunn, Stuart, and Mark Hedges. 2012. Crowd-Sourcing Scoping Study: Engaging the Crowd with Humanities Research. London.
• Hagon, Paul. Information online trove crowdsourcing behaviour (slides)
• Holley, Rose. 2010. ‘Crowdsourcing: How and Why Should Libraries Do It?’ D-Lib Magazine.
• Kosmala, Margaret. 2013. “Analysis of ‘Save Snapshot Serengeti’.” Snapshot Serengeti.  http://blog.snapshotserengeti.org/2013/08/28/analysis-of-save-snapshot-serengeti/. [Citizen science]
• Terras, M (2009) Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation. Literary and Linguistic Computing , 25 (4) 425 – 438. 10.1093/llc/fqq019.
• Oomen, Johan, and Lora Aroyo. 2011. “Crowdsourcing in the Cultural Heritage Domain: Opportunities and Challenges.” In 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Vol. 29.
• Ridge, Mia. 2013. “From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing.” Curator: The Museum Journal 56, no. 4
• Ridge, Mia. 2012. Frequently Asked Questions about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, Open Objects
• Ridge, Mia. 2011. Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2011: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics.
• RunCoCo's Run a Community Collection Online
• Trant, J. (2009) Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Results of steve.museum’s Research. In: Archives & Museum Informatics: 2009. http://conference.archimuse.com/files/trantSteveResearchReport2008.pdf

Crowdfunding

• Crowdfunding – A Guide by Blast Theory, January 2015.
• Caplan-Bricker, Nora. 2013. “Crowdfunding Culture: Namaste, and Welcome to the Smithsonian.” New Republic.
• Lewis, Caroline. 2013. "Crowdfunding the Library." Library Journal. April 17. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/04/funding/crowdfunding-the-library/.
• Mitra, Tanushree, and Eric Gilbert. 2014. “The Language That Gets People to Give: Phrases That Predict Success on Kickstarter.” CSCW. Mitra, Tanushree, and Eric Gilbert. “The Language That Gets People to Give: Phrases That Predict Success on Kickstarter.” CSCW, 2014. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw14.crowdfunding.mitra.pdf.
• Morgan Gore, Erin & DiGiammarino, Breanna. Crowdfunding for Nonprofits. Stanford Social Innovation Review
• Speed, Emily. 2012. “How to Get Crowd-Funding.” A-N The Artists Information Company, November 2012. http://www.a-n.co.uk/knowledge_bank/article/1002915/77173.
• Schiller, Ben. 2012. “Unglue.It: Crowd-Funding A Revolution In Libraries.” Co.Exist. http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679462/unglueit-crowd-funding-a-revolution-in-libraries.
• Murphy, Bill. 2014. “10 Secrets to a Really Successful Kickstarter Campaign.” Inc.com, http://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/10-secrets-to-a-really-successful-kickstarter-campaign.html.
• See also: http://www.kicktraq.com/hotlist/ for a sample of successful projects