Crowding the library: How and why libraries are using crowdsourcing to engage the public

Abstract

Over the past 10 years, there has been a noticeable increase of crowdsourcing projects in cultural heritage institutions, where digital technologies are being used to open up their collections and encourage the public to engage with them in a very direct way. Libraries, archives, and museums have long had a history and mandate of outreach and public engagement but crowdsourcing marks a move towards a more participatory and inclusive model of engagement. If a library wants to start a crowdsourcing project, what do they need to know?This article is written from a Canadian library perspective with the goal to help the reader engage with the current crowdsourcing landscape. This article's contribution includes a literature review and a survey of popular projects and platforms, followed by a case study of a crowdsourcing pilot completed at the McGill Library. The article pulls these two threads of theory and practice together, with a discussion of some of the best practices learned through the literature and real-life experience, giving the reader

Benefits of crowdsourcing for libraries: A case study from Africa

“…While the most detailed understanding of crowdsourcing comes from Estellés-Arolas and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara (2012), Holley (2010: 2; emphasis added) makes a helpful distinction in that "crowdsourcing relies on sustained input from a group of people working towards a common goal, whereas social engagement may be transitory, sporadic or done just once." In this sense, libraries have utilized crowdsourcing to increase the usability of archival content (Lascarides and Vershbow, 2014;Severson and Sauvé, 2019), create and curate new content (Oomen and Aroyo, 2011), and transcribe and correct existing content (Holley, 2010), among many other varied applications. Crucially, crowdsourcing has proven a strategic way for libraries to overcome gaps in funding for public-facing projects-a need echoed by mapping-related initiatives as well (Koontz et al, 2004;Li et al, 2016).…”

Editorial

“…The ongoing proliferation of online content generation and communication technologies creates many opportunities for public sectors, cultural heritage institutions and humanities scholars to engage the crowd in data collection, sharing, analysis, processing and reuse, sensemaking and value co-creation known as crowdsourcing activities in digital humanities. Although the literature on crowdsourcing and collaboration in digital humanities recognizes the opportunities of some topicsfor example, conceptualization of crowdsourcing in GLAMs (Holley, 2010;Oomen and Aroyo, 2011;Ridge, 2016), task characteristics (Carletti et al, 2015;Terras, 2016), user motivation and engagement (Alam and Campbell, 2017;Severson and Sauve, 2019), technological appropriation (Granell and Mart ınez-Hinarejos, 2016;Iranowska, 2019) and quality control and assessment (Causer et al, 2018;McKinley, 2013;Parent and Eskenazi, 2010) it remains relatively silent on the sociocultural acts and contextualization used to advance understandings. In this regard, there is a pressing need to explore and understand theoretical, methodological and practical issues of crowdsourcing and collaboration in digital humanities.…”

“…Crowdsourcing initiatives of GLAMs strive to offer citizens the opportunity of being deeply involved in the production, utilization, communication, preservation and curation of digital collections in the cultural heritage domain (Lankes et al, 2007;Terras, 2016). For example, there have been some attempts to crowdsource complex tasks traditionally only handled by academics or domain experts to the general public (Ridge, 2013;Severson and Sauve, 2019;Zhao and Zhu, 2016). Terras (2016) stresses that many crowdsourcing projects carried out within GLAMs naturally fit under the digital humanities umbrella, and it is difficult to make a distinction between crowdsourcing in cultural heritage sectors and the area of digital humanities, as many projects from GLAMs are leveraging crowdsourcing not only to organize or manage cultural-historical information but to provide the methodologies and mediating tools for generating and co-creating novel information about our past and future.…”

“…There are several potential benefits in using crowdsourcing within digital humanities (Causer and Terras, 2014a;Holley, 2010;Ridge, 2016;Severson and Sauve, 2019;Terras, 2016). First, cultural heritage institutions can further activate collections and mobilize support through crowdsourcing in resource organization, platform development and service delivery.…”

The effectiveness of using crowdsourcing for improving information services: an action research approach

“…The literature has not provided consensus on a specific definition for crowdsourcing in the field of library and information science. However, Severson and Sauv e (2019) pointed to the difficulty of restricting the definition to a single domain. Also, they highlighted its cross-disciplinarity and its applicability to library and information services (Severson and Sauv e, 2019) Hence this study aims to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of using crowdsourcing as a means of capturing data from social networking sites for developing information services in academic libraries in the Sultanate of Oman.…”