Museums have long survived on the generosity of volunteers who carry out vital work to support the everyday work of the institution. Today I want to look at how volunteering is evolving for the digital world, with interesting projects which ask the public to volunteer their time online.
Crowdsourcing:
Crowdsourcing is the term used to describe people coming together online to collectively solve a problem. A task is collectively shared by those taking part, whether that is to label objects in a digital collection or to build an exhibition.
Here are few interesting ways in which museums are using crowdsourcing:
V&A – Search the Collections:
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a collection database of 140,000 images, these are selected from a database automatically and don’t always show the object to it’s best. The V&A recently launched a crowdsourcing project to ask members of the public to help them to select the best images to use in the collections database.
There are over 116,000 objects which the V&A hopes the public with volunteer to help them sift through. You can sign up to help them and give the V&A crowdsourcing project project a go yourself here.
Memorial Exhibition Archive:
Most history museums do not deal with something as recent as the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, and the unique position which The September 11 Memorial and Museum holds, has given the organisation the opportunity to ask the public to contribute to the creation of their collection through their website.
The memories, mementos and pictures added to the collection will all contribute to ensuring that those lost on September 11th will never be forgotten.
Democracy:
Democracy was an exhibition of graphic design which took place in October 2009, this project asked the public not only to submit work, but also to curate the final selection by voting for which artworks merited inclusion in the final exhibition.
Once the exhibition opened, the public could still vote and change the layout of the exhibition space, which was digitally projected on to the gallery walls.
Tag! You’re it!:
While the V&A crowdsorucing project focused on finding the right crop for images in it’s collection database, this example from the Brooklyn Museum asks the public to instead tag the images with keywords to make them easier to find.
The Brooklyn Museum turned this task in to a game, encouraging people to compete to top the leaderboard of top taggers.
I am interested to find more examples of crowdsourcing within museums, is this something which your institution is using? Please leave a comment and share your project with our readers.
Many thanks for this article as it has given me ideas on how to use crowdsourcing for some of our communication and outreach activities in future. I love ideas such as this to reach out to people using the digital media. I’ll let you know if I end up with a project.
There are many interesting crowdsourcing projects and I am interested to see how the results of these projects can and will be implemented.
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision launched a video labeling game called Waisda? (which translates to What’s That?). The game invites users to tag what they see and hear and they receive points for a tag if it matches a tag that their opponent has entered. The underlying assumption is that tags are most probably valid if there’s mutual agreement. Over 2,000 people played the game and within six months, over 340k tags have been added to over 600 items from the archive.
More on the project and the results can be found here.
Other interesting tagging projects are Flickr: The Commons and steve.museum (http://www.flickr.com/commons, http://steve.museum/). The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney allows users to tag objects directly in their online catalogue (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/browsekeywords.php).
The Great War Project from the University of Oxford asked the general public to contribute digitised items (and metadata) from the WWI period. More on that project can be found here: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/.
There are many other great projects out there, such as The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiativeject (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh-blog/?p=124), just too many to list here. If I find the time, I will submit more
.
Let’s give a plug for the natural sciences fraternity, who rarely seem to get a mention in the Social Media world!
Rather than one single museum’s project, Herbaria@Home is an online project run by the Botanical Society of the British Isles that is currently helping a number of UK museums and academic institutions document their herbarium collections. Photos of pressed plant specimens are taken – along with their data labels – and the data is extracted and uploaded by volunteers working from home.
(http://herbariaunited.org/atHome)
Over 51,000 specimen sheets have been catalogued so far. I’ve not used it myself as I was fortunate enough to have a husband and wife team volunteer a day a week for nearly two years to help me document my museums’ small collection of 9,000 specimens
I found this article really interesting – we have recently used Geocaching to great effect at our interpretation centre for medieval art. The treasure hunt element of Geocaching fitted well with our aim to get people out looking at the objects still insitu across the county and attracted a younger audience. We were also able to tap into the existing community of geocachers.
We will certainly look into crowdsourcing as a way of writing labels for the virtual exhibition we currently have on Flickr.