Crowdsourcing: British Museum and British Library

The British Museum: MicroPasts

The British Museum, along with University College London and the Arts & Humanities Research Council, uses MicroPasts to post crowdsourcing tasks. Daniel Pitt (British Museum) jointly leads MicroPasts with Andrew Bevan (University College London). These tasks can include helping identify the location of artifact findspots/photographs of scenes, identify subject matter in historic archives, transcribe letters and catalogues, and masking of photos for 3D modelling. Users can also submit their own photos of archaeological sites/objects.

There are six projects open to contribute to at the moment. After registering, one of the tasks I completed was to help transcribe the Magic Mountain catalogue. This was basic data entry, and prior to starting the task, a pop-up emerges giving you the direction of the task. More detailed instructions follow until your reach the start of your task.

 Much of the British Museum’s mission is dedicated to reaching diverse audiences beyond London, and crowdsourcing is a great way for them to do so. MicroPasts believe that the number one contributor, Joellen McGann, is from the U.S., which shows that the British Museum’s collections are being viewed by people from other countries. You can see the top contributors as well as how many tasks they have completed. You can also see when different community members joined.

Overall the website itself is easy to use and the tasks are mostly basic data-entry transcriptions. It's pretty cool to see how you measure up compared to other contributors, which can be used to make the contributions and tasks as part of a competition if wanted. Stats are very easy to find, but I couldn't find a way to see how the completed tasks are "graded" and evaluated by workers from either the British Museum or University College London.

The British Library: LibCrowds

The British Library uses LibCrowds, in association with BL labs, to host experimental crowdsourcing projects from the British Library. The British Library's mission is to simply "advance the world's knowledge." This type of crowdsourcing is helping to advance the world's knowledge by getting people directly involved in helping to transcribe materials that they may not have ever looked at before. Registering is relatively easy, requiring you to make a profile. On your profile you can see your rank and the projects you have contributed to.

The projects are mostly card catalogue transcription work, with some being "featured" like Indonesian Card Catalogue: Drawer Three

You can also see how complete the project is, how many tasks are remaining, how active it is, and how many have contributed to it.

This website also has easily accessible stats. You can access those who contribute the most, the location of where the most contributors are from, and to see daily contributions.

The website is easy to navigate like the MicroPasts website, and offers easy access to statistics. This project does not offer detailed instructions like the MicroPasts one though, but that could be due to these card catalogue tasks being mostly self-explanatory. Both websites seem to be very successful and have many users contributing completed tasks. It is hard to tell, based on the website, how accurate these completed tasks are and if the data submitted is actually being used by either of these institutions.