Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage

Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of mutually beneficial engagement with the collections and research of museums, libraries, archives and academia, it benefits both audiences and institutions. However, successful crowdsourcing projects reflect a commitment to developing effective interface and technical designs. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions devised the right combination of source material and the tasks for their ’crowd’. The authors provide theoretically informed, actionable insights on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, outlining the context in which their projects were created, the challenges and opportunities that informed decisions during implementation, and reflecting on the results. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.

Mia Ridge specialises in user experience design for participation and engagement in cultural heritage and the digital humanities, and has advised organisations such as the BBC, Public Catalogue Foundation, The Science Museum Group and the V&A Museum on usability, audience participation and crowdsourcing. Mia has lead workshops teaching design for crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and academia for groups such as the British Library’s Digital Scholarship programme and the Digital Humanities 2013 conference. Her research at the Open University focuses on effective design for participatory digital history and the collaborative enhancement of historical materials.