Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain

Abstract

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (short: GLAMs) around the globe are beginning to explore the potential of crowdsourcing, i.e. outsourcing specific activities to a community though an open call. In this paper, we propose a typology of these activities, based on an empirical study of a substantial amount of projects initiated by relevant cultural heritage institutions. We use the Digital Content Life Cycle model to study the relation between the different types of crowdsourcing and the core activities of heritage organizations. Finally, we focus on two critical challenges that will define the success of these collaborations between amateurs and professionals: (1) finding sufficient knowledgeable, and loyal users; (2) maintaining a reasonable level of quality. We thus show the path towards a more open, connected and smart cultural heritage: open (the data is open, shared and accessible), connected (the use of linked data allows for interoperable infrastructures, with users and providers getting more and more connected), and smart (the use of knowledge and web technologies allows us to provide interesting data to the right users, in the right context, anytime, anywhere -both with involved users/consumers and providers). It leads to a future cultural heritage that is open, has intelligent infrastructures and has involved users, consumers and providers.

Exploring cultural heritage repositories with creative intelligence. The Labyrinth 3D system

“…Metadata may include, for example, the relations of heritage objects with locations, artists, historical events, etc. Although professional annotators are preferred, metadata may be also contributed by amateurs through crowd sourcing, as recently proposed by [43].…”

Nichesourcing: Harnessing the Power of Crowds of Experts

“…Indeed, many museums and cultural heritage archives have already embraced the notion of human-computing in order to solve the same problem. Typically, they apply crowdsourcing techniques [7], [12]. As a result they receive large quantities of metadata, but not necessarily of sufficient quality [13].…”

“…Initially, these crowdsourcing initiatives were centered around users performing simple tasks and their overall target was geared towards achieving quantity rather than quality. Currently, we observe [7] that there is (i) a growing demand for solving also complex knowledge-intensive tasks [8], and (ii) a natural expectation to focus on the quality of the final result [9]. In this paper, we argue that nichesourcing is the next natural step in the evolution of crowdsourcing to address those two demands.…”

Crowdsourcing en bibliotecas

“…Las motivaciones del público para participar en un proyecto de tal envergadura pueden ser diversas: aprender o profundizar en una temática, ganar experiencia, buscar reconocimiento, compartir conocimiento, identificarse con una idea o causa, desarrollar habilidades creativas, entretenimiento, altruismo, entre otras (Oomen y Aroyo, 2011;Ridge, 2014;Velasco, 2013;Zarndt, 2012).…”

“…Justamente, este proyecto se basa en la idea de que existen tareas que los seres humanos desarrollan más efectivamente que las computadoras. Probablemente es un claro ejemplo de una plataforma construida alrededor de interacciones que se basan en motivaciones extrínsecas (Oomen y Aroyo, 2011) "Old Weather" (http://www.oldweather.org/) es un proyecto que se enmarca dentro de Zooniverse, una red de científicos-ciudadanos, que tiene como objetivo producir investigación que sólo se puede realizar gracias a la contribuciones del público. La idea consiste en transcribir las bitácoras de las embarcaciones de Estados Unidos desde mediados del siglo XIX.…”