Community collections: what are the challenges?

Community collections:what are

the challenges

?

Paola Marchionni, Programme Manager [email protected] @paolamarchionni

What did we do?

programme to foster public engagement with online content

Why did we do it? *rise of social media * lots of interesting content,

knowledge and expertise out there *widening participation and public engagement agendas

*new approaches to digitisation and content creation *two-way engagement between content

providers and audiences

Challenge #1: engaging a variety of communities

• There are many disparate ‘communities’ out there to

potentially engage with, with their own ‘culture’: schools, heritage orgs; socially excluded groups,

citizen at large

• How do we successfully engage with all of them? What are the

barriers?

• What kind of interaction (human mediation/automated task-based)

and technologies will be appropriate? (eg digitisation,

transcription, UGC, task resolution)

Challenge #2: blurring the boundaries,

‘users’ as creators• Paradigm shift where

members of the public are not just ‘users’ or ‘volunteers’ but become creators, co-curators,

cataloguers, editors, historians, digitisation collaborators.

• But what implications does this have on notions of trust,

authority, quality, IPR? • What does this mean for

researchers, educators, learners?

Challenge #3: motivation, recognition and impact

• People/communities will need some kind of motivation and

gratification for taking part.

• How do we ensure this is a two-way exchange where all parties benefit (eg sharing knowledge

and expertise, developing digital literacy, encouraging social

cohesion…)

• Making it fun?

• Providing reward opportunities?

Challenge #4: it’s not all ‘free’– sustainability

• A lot of resources go into community collections

projects: technical infrastructure, community

interaction, data management,

maintenance…

• How can community collections/crowdsourcing be developed as part of a larger public engagement

mission?

• What about scalability?

Screen grabs on slides

JISC Content portal : www.jisc-content.ac.uk (all digital collections funded or licenced by JISC)

JISC Community Collections programmes:Developing Community Content http://bit.ly/LaEuDM

Content programme 2011 Strand B: Developing Community Collections http://bit.ly/UrXDDf

My Leicestershire History – Image ref http://bit.ly/PKj6CQ (cover slide)Strandlines http://www.strandlines.net/ (slide 2)

Old Weather http://www.oldweather.org/ (slide 2)RunCoCo/Great War Archive http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/ and

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/ (slide 3)Transcribe Bentham: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/ (slide 3)

Digitalkoot http://www.digitalkoot.fi/en (slide 4)My Leicestershire History http://myleicestershire.org.uk – Image ref:

http://cdm16445.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16445coll2/id/835

) (slide 4)Old Weather http://www.oldweather.org/ (slide 5)

Other JISC resources

Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement http://bit.ly/KhjrJU (feasibility study on running community

collections projects)“ RunCoCo: how to run a community collection online” in

Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources http://bit.ly/KJ0WhB

Capturing the Power of the Crowd and the Challenge of Community Collections http://bit.ly/PJV374

Forthcoming (Jan 2013)Evaluation and synthesis of JISC Developing Community

Content and Developing Community Collections programmes (for more information, please email Paola Marchionni

[email protected])