Museum Crowdsourcing Games: Improving Collections Through Play (and some thoughts on re-inventing museums)

A presentation for the Inspiration Seminar on Digital Communications and Heritage (Inspirationsseminarium Digital kommunikation & kulturarv, #kulturwebb) at the Nordic Museum, organised by the Nordic Museum's New Media department in collaboration with Mabb and IdeK lab.

I've saved my slides and speaker notes as a PDF (7mb): Museum Crowdsourcing Games: Improving Collections Through Play (and some thoughts on the future of museums) and the video is at http://bambuser.com/channel/nordiskamuseet/broadcast/1646762 (though I'm not sure how long it'll be there).

You can also find related posts on my blog, Open Objects, at https://www.openobjects.org.uk/search/label/crowdsourcing and https://www.openobjects.org.uk/search/label/games.

Chapter 'Crowdsourcing games: playing with museums'

The book 'Museums At Play: Games, Interaction and Learning' is edited by freelance strategist Katy Beale and published by MuseumsEtc.  My chapter, 'Crowdsourcing games: playing with museums' discusses the power of crowdsourcing games and the participation economy, possible new relationships with audiences and new types of engagement with objects, and the potential for an ecosystem of museum games based around collections.

Paper: Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections

My paper for Museums and the Web 2011, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections, is online and is also available in the printed proceedings.

Abstract: Crowdsourcing the creation, correction or enhancement of data about objects through games is an attractive proposition for museums looking to maximize use of their collections online without committing intensive curatorial resources to enhancing catalogue records. This paper investigates the optimum game designs to encourage participation and the generation of useful data through a case study of the project Museum Metadata Games that successfully designed games that created improved metadata for 'difficult' objects from two science and history museum collections.

Keywords: collections, games, crowdsourcing, objects, metadata, tagging