Making collections accessible online through crowdsourcing

For heritage institutions, crowdsourcing is a fantastic solution to making collections accessible. Every archive or museum has a sizeable collection that is never considered for digitisation and indexing, as it is too much work for the employees and volunteers there. As with crowdsourcing an appeal is made to the general public, this suddenly becomes possible. Many hands make light work.

Heritage Helpers

In order to facilitate the crowdsourcing of heritage collections, Vitec Memorix has developed Heritage Helpers: a crowdsourcing website for the heritage sector. On this website any heritage institution with a collection can put forward a project to be made accessible by the ‘crowd’, i.e. the general public. The project is organised in such a way on Heritage Helpers that the volunteers can work from their own computer, at a time that suits them. The required activites range from indexing to image selection. It is remarkable that whilst anyone can work on it, the quality of work delivered is unprecedented. The passion with which the volunteers work for Heritage Helpers should not be underestimated.

Work off your hands

Institutions which take part can chose for themselves to what extent they wish to be involved in the crowdsourcing. The interaction with the volunteers has in fact been found to be both valuable and fun. When the project is completed, then the project is taken off Heritage Helpers and sent back to the institution. The institution can then decide whether to integrate the collection within their own website or to present it on a new website. 

What are the possibilities?

Indexing

With the aid of pre-prepared forms, the volunteer gathers information, for example ‘name’, ‘location’ and ‘date of birth’ on the basis of the scanned source.

Linking

Volunteers ensure that the different information is linked to each other. For example a person’s name will be linked to the correct register. 

Image selection

Based on contact sheets with series of negatives, volunteers choose the best image in the series.

Tagging

Adding keywords to photos. This may be with previously prepared ‘tags’, but it is also possible to allow volunteers to think of their own keywords.

Your choice

If other tools are necessary in order to make your source documents accessible, then customised development is always a possibility.