Including the Public in Description: Enriching Access to Collections through Crowdsourcing

Cultural institutions have experimented with, and invested in, crowdsourcing over the last decade; perhaps most notably on transcription projects such as the Smithsonian Transcription Center, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza project, and the Freedmen’s Bureau project. Transcription is still one of the core tasks offered on crowdsourcing platforms, however, more tasks than transcription can be leveraged to enrich collections. This presentation looks at metadata crowdsourcing projects as a way to expand access points and enhance representation by framing these projects as a mission centric engaging activity with the public. As social justice movements challenge power structures, the ways in which cultural institutions create knowledge are also under scrutiny. Instead of using traditional top-down approaches to cataloguing, cultural institutions should be actively co-creating object metadata and research with the public. Using my doctoral research as a case study, this presentation centers on how public involvement enriches the narratives shared, building transparency and trust within organizations and the surrounding communities whilst increasing accessibility through diversified language and enriched image description. This case study will examine three prongs to crowdsourcing projects: the ability to engage a more representative and diverse public than is represented by museum staff alone, the promise of these projects to be a transparent and engaging experience for the public, and the opportunity tagging projects present to bridge semantic gaps between cataloguers and the public while also providing important image descriptions.