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. 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 session will examine three prongs to describing collections with the public: 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. The presentation will demonstrate how this work can not only increase access to collections within catalogue search portals, but also be used as a tool for increasing alt-text and image description to open up collections online for those with disabilities or those accessing images outside the museum’s official accounts. It will highlight how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models can be incorporated into such projects, allowing institutions to teach a level of digital literacy and critique of these technologies in real time, allowing users to experience the promises of the models while also confronting the biases and limitations of them. By highlighting qualitative and quantitative data, this session will endeavor to show a new way to look at community engagement and digital literacy education using crowdsourcing.

This session will provide a contextual and literature review to demonstrate the major issues affecting cultural heritage institutions today and the trust the public holds in them. After laying out the problems in the field, the session will present the three prongs to crowdsourcing projects. Participants will be presented quantitative and qualitative data that:

1. Demonstrates the importance of language to the searchability and findability of collections, and the bias in current description processes.
2. The promise of these projects to be a more transparent and engaging experience for the public than AI technologies, demonstrating qualitative data on trust and perception of museum guests.
3. The opportunity crowdsourcing projects present to digital literacy skills like language choice, AI bias, institutional bias, and more, while also providing important accessibility features like image descriptions and alt-text.

Attendees to this session will walk away with an understanding of cultural heritage crowdsourcing and the ways to adapt these experiences to engage the public, increase trust with the public, teach digital literacy on bias, AI, and automation.