This week’s Paul Conway, Oya Rieger, and James O’Toole
readings grapple with the evolution of archives in the digital age. Digital
archives have many advantages such as enabling use from far off locations and
protecting originals from handling. Nevertheless, the digitization process
involves time and resources that can be overlooked. Rieger and Conway spoke
specifically of how digitization can have unforeseen consequences such as
prompting the disposal of original materials and poor quality standards. Thinking
about how archives can best handle large digitization projects led me to
consider the benefits and costs of crowdsourcing. Archives are implementing a
variety of crowdsourcing techniques, most of which revolve around user
transcription and metadata.
From an idealist standpoint, crowdsourcing is a great idea.
It creates a reciprocal relationship between user and archive. In order for the
archive to make large amounts of information available to everyone, everyone
can put in a little help. In “Crowdsourcing: How and Why Should Libraries Do
It?” Rose Holley articulates the relationship between crowdsourcing and social
engagement. The reality of getting people to give their time, how to monitor
them, and how to thank them are other issues.
Crowdsourcing could be a way to solve some of the problems
that large scale digitization brings about for archives, but it is a solution
that comes with its own costs. I have begun looking at the variety of projects
that use crowdsourcing. While I am a huge fan of many of these projects, I am
interested in how they force people and archives to create new relationships.
Many of these projects exist outside of finding aides and mainstream scholarly
work. Often the materials used revolve around popular topics that archives can
get people excited to help out with such as old menus and war diaries.
Some projects that have or are currently using
crowdsourcing:
(Being one of the Internet’s largest crowdsourcing projects,
it is only fitting that I got most of these from Wikipedia’s “List of
crowdsourcing projects” page.)
Readings
Conway, Paul. "Archival Quality and Long-Term
Preservation: A Research Framework for Validating the Usefulness of Digital Surrogates." Archival Science 11, no. 3-4 (2011):
293-309.
O'Toole, James M. "On the Idea of Permanence." American Archivist 52, no. 1
(1989): 10-25.
Rieger, Oya Y. "Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization:
A White Paper.” Council on Library
and Information Resources. Washington D.C. (2008).
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