University of Szeged Klebelsberg Library
In this lesson, we will take a closer look at the concept of community content development and the services that operate on this basis.
It is strongly related to crowdsourcing, which is a term coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine in 2006 to describe how some companies outsource work to private individuals online.
Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as follows:
“The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of “crowd” and “outsourcing”. […] Crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. […] Crowdsourcing can either take an explicit or an implicit route. Explicit crowdsourcing lets users work together to evaluate, share, and build different specific tasks, while implicit crowdsourcing means that users solve a problem as a side effect of something else they are doing.”
Source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
* Saves time, energy, and money
* Possibility of outsourcing to competent professionals
* Faster delivery due to the distribution of tasks
* Increased likelihood of imprecision or errors in work
* Confidential information could be leaked more easily
* Misunderstanding, misdirection, failure to recognise opportunities for further development.
Main types of crowdsourcing (source):
The types below are of the knowledge and creation type, where everyone adds their own knowledge about a topic, image, place, etc. However, it is important to review this information, so sites should have editors and administrators who manage, organise, format and maintain the content they share.
Trove is an Australian platform that provides access to digital copies of the collections of numerous Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries, and archives. Trove’s partners contribute to the website with their digital collections, which are then customized, by professionals as well members of the community, to be made available through Trove or Trove Partner websites.
a. 1 million digitized journal pages (with digitization funded by partners); 11 million newspaper pages
b. 231 million digitized articles and audio recordings
c. Over 1,500 digitized newspapers, including 38 migrant community newspapers
d. 1 million articles in foreign languages (non-English)
Trove aims to provide access to Australia’s cultural collections to the greatest extent possible, focusing on the following:
Allowing partners to import their physical, digital, or online collections to Trove, and to add relevant descriptions
Assisting partners in digitizing their collections, including the digitization of items potentially missing from their collections, such as local newspapers or journals
Helping partners manage their collections by cataloging, and embedding links from records in Trove directly into their own catalogs
Helping partners by providing them statistical, strategic, and business data
Trove’s features based on contributions by members of the community include:
Lists of items selected from the collection based on various criteria or research interests can be private or collaborative.
Volunteers can add notes to almost every item in the Trove collection, and these notes generally include relevant information data, dates, or location information in connection with the given items.
Volunteers can add additional keywords to items to make them easier to find, with tags describing things such as a topic, a place, an event, a person, a feeling, or even personal progress in research.
Volunteers can correct text transcripts (provided for items in the collection) if they notice any errors in such transcripts.
Volunteers can add categories to the lists of categories to which articles are assigned in order to provide specific details that make finding such articles easier.
Volunteers can add images to Trove through Flickr (which is an image hosting website) to enrich the way in which Australian culture is presented in Trove’s collection (with images of festivals, historical events, cities, or even landscapes).
Fortepan is a Hungarian community-based photo archive site, where visitors can browse and download over a hundred thousand archived photos. The material available on the site is free to use, with only attribution to the respective sources of downloaded images required.
“This website was launched in 2010 and it initially contained discarded photographs found randomly in the streets of Budapest. The archive has expanded since then through donations from families, amateur and professional photographers, along with public collections. The images on the website are selected by editors. The descriptions attached to the images are compiled and edited by volunteers.”
Source
Fortepan: https://fortepan.hu/en/
Members of the community can upload documents (their own images) or help organise the data (by providing a location, who is in the picture, when and where it was taken, etc.), making the database administrators’ job easier.
Visitors of the Fortepan site can now not only browse images but also use a separate feature for viewing recently added items. In addition, the search bar allows users to search by location or name, or to enter simple search terms. However, images can also be browsed specifically for a particular period by using the timeline slider to select the required year.
For instance, users can search for images of Szeged from the 1980s. The video tutorial shows how many and what kinds of documents can be found this way.
Hungaricana aims to provide access to digitized public collections available at Hungarian institutions.
Source: About Hungaricana
Hungaricana is not a single database but a collection of different databases that contain documents collected in cooperation with academic institutions and users to cover various subjects.
This database contains tens of thousands of documents, including graphics, postcards, photos, and images of tapestry and artwork, even allowing users to search in the Fortepan database.
This database provides access to materials in a wide range of collections, including local history collections, archives, document archives, and specialized library collections. These collections contain numerous items that were originally published in small numbers and distributed on a limited scale, with many of them physically available today only in a few collections.
This database allows users to see how the structure of the city of Budapest has been transformed over time. Users can also view aerial photographs that offer a glimpse of the state Budapest was in during World War II, or they can see what happened in various parts of the city during the events of the 1956 revolution.
The database contains the sound archive and notations of folk music collections. It also contains Zoltán Kodály’s manuscript collection of melodies.
Depending on their field of research, anyone can find many useful databases with freely available resources. Among the multitude of materials, users may browse ancient maps, or old photos revealing the history of various cities, or other cultural heritage documents. It is also possible to personally contribute to the enhancement of these collections if someone has the time to do so.