Enriching and enhancing digital cultural heritage through crowd contribution

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the status of digitization of manuscripts in India and to give suggestions to transcribe these manuscripts easily, effortlessly and expeditiously. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on the analytical study of the literature available on global efforts in respect of documentation, preservation, conservation and digitization of manuscripts with special emphasis on the efforts of “namami” (acronym for National Manuscript Mission) for Indian manuscripts. Findings Meticulous analysis of literature and case studies give an overview of the diverse practices of public participation/crowd collaboration to transcribe and tagging of the rare and old historical documents around the globe. However, Indian libraries are far behind in adopting such practices. Practical implications India has a very rich cultural, educational and research heritage preserved in the form of manuscripts. These thousands of manuscripts are significant source of knowledge base for many researchers, however, despite their heritage value, these remain inaccessible to the researchers because of their being scattered and unpublished form. Moreover, even the digitized manuscripts remain difficult to use by the researchers because of immense linguistic diversity and scripts. Documentation and digitization of these manuscripts will not only preserve the invaluable heritage of India but also will enable their easy and vast access by the researchers globally. With the rapid growth in digital information and web-based technology, galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) around the world encourage and engage public participation in various digitization projects to enrich and enhance their digital collections and place them on the web. However, Indian GLAM still refrains to accept and adopt such practices. Thus this paper will encourage and motivate the Indian GLAM to expedite their digitization and uploading them on web for tagging and transcribing. Originality/value This is an original paper and has great implementation value. During the study enormous literature was available on digitization of Indian manuscripts. However, not even a single study could be found on tagging and transcription of these manuscripts, specifically crowd contribution in this area. Hence, the paper, by presenting the evidences of crowd participation for the tagging and transcription of manuscripts globally, proposes the Indian GLAM to exploit the benefits of this practice for Indian manuscripts also in order to expedite the tagging process to enhance their usage.

Evaluating the Scholarly Trends on Issues, Strategies and Sustainable Development of Digitisation of Documentary Heritage: A Thematic Review

“…Crowdsourcing is a technique of outsourcing tasks to a broad, loosely defined external group of people called crowdsourcing (Gupta & Sharma, 2017). Crowdsourcing is a means to use talents of the crowd.…”

“…The Amsterdam City Archive was not just crowdsourcing the index for the militia registers, but it also raised funds from public to scan the documents. The libraries turned to crowdsourcing to translate the documents because few researchers who want to access the materials are fluent in Yiddish, which is written in Hebrew characters (Gupta & Sharma, 2017). A range of crowdsourcing activities are now taking place across the cultural and heritage sector, often disrupting activities which were thought to be the preserve of academics and historians, for example an array of transcription projects has been launched over the past few years that allow volunteers to read and transcribe digitized images of manuscript material to ensure that their con-tents are findable and reusable by others (Terras, 2015b).…”

Digital Finance for Circular Economy in Sustainable Environment

“…Leviakangas P discussed how the Australian construction industry has kept pace with digitization compared to other industries in Australia [9]. The purpose of the Sharma V study was to determine the current state of manuscript digitization in India and to provide recommendations for the ease, ease and speed of transcribing these manuscripts [10]. Meng W proposed a compact but efficient trust-based method using Bayesian inference to identify malicious nodes [11].…”

Visual Digitized Artwork for Archiving Model of Sustainable Context

“…Moreover, even though in India, the status of digitization has been explored, which works closely with manuscripts in India. Digitalization was chosen to transcribe the manuscripts quickly, effortlessly, and expeditiously (Gupta & Sharma, 2017).…”