Crowdsourcing: The Great War Archive & Europeana 1914-1918

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa
http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en

The Great War Archive was a project led by the University of Oxford from March to June 2008. The purpose of the project was to gather and digitize artifacts related to World War 1, with all of the digitization and submission of works done by the public. Though the project is officially 'finished', the project maintains an active flickr page for people to share and submit additional images to.  The Great War Archive site is hosted as part of the website used by a separate, non-crowdfunded project, The First World War Digital Poetry Archive. That the two archives are separate isn't immediately clear, though.

The website for the Great War Archive is fairly simple, with a standard navigation bar and multiple search functions (including the option for users to search for images they personally submitted via the 'Find Items I Have Submitted' search bar). There are options to browse by keywords and by submission events, which were as the name indicates, events hosted by the project that allowed people to submit materials in person. The collections are broken down by two major subheadings (Poets and The War in Context) and from there are broken down further into individual subjects, photographic collections, audio collections, film collections, and war publications. Again, due to the fact that the website is hosting two different yet topically related archives, it's unclear if the collection button on the navigation bar is the correct one for visitors to use if they want to look at crowd submitted archival materials.

The "About" page does a good job of explaining how the project worked, why crowdsourcing was used, how obstacles were overcome, and how the project continues beyond its official end date. 
One of the major issues the project faced was the cost of digitization. The initiative thought that to gather materials using traditional methods would be more time consuming and more expensive. But to do nothing would mean risk losing valuable, unique materials. Opening the project up to public submission and "Using the web as a collection medium and tapping into the public's enthusiasm for preserving the nation's heritage" (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/about) allowed to project to work around expense issues that could have crippled a similar project using solely traditional methods.
The About page also goes into the submission process, and talks about how the system that was put in place was a simple one that went through copyright in an easy to understand matter and "collected some essential metadata but in a way that would not be off-putting as it was recognized that many of the contributors would be elderly and not that familiar with online submissions" (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/about). I liked that they look into consideration who their main submitters would likely be, and worked the process around them so that it wouldn't be overly complicated or confusing.
In addition to the online submission process, the project also hosted in person collection shows that worked by reaching out into the community. And while the project is officially closed, allowing users to continue to submit and share via Flicker (albeit without the same copyright and metadata allowances that the original project submission site had) means that nobody is really locked out of sharing because they missed the relatively narrow time window.

The project was considered a success and inspired other collections to use similar models. Among those projects using a similar model are the Welsh Voices of the Great War Online (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/share/research/projectreports/welshvoices/) and the next crowdsourcing site I looked at, Europeana 1914-1918.

http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en

Europeana, Europe's digital archive, library, and museum portal, teamed up with Oxford University and other major European sources to gather different types of materials related to World War 1. This included national collections, film archives, and stories from the public via crowdsourcing. Based on the initial Great War Archive project, Europeana 1914-1918 collected materials from 2012 to 2014, and primarily did its crowdsourcing work through roadshows and the online story collection site (http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en/contributor).
Interestingly, the Europeana site also encouraged the public to get involved in running their own Family History Roadshows to gather, digitize, and add materials to the project, meaning people weren't just limited to roadshows run by the project. The site provides pdf files for those interested in running their own roadshow, including workflows, catalog guides, brief, preparing for submissions, etc.

The one big downside I'm finding with the Europeana project is that you need to register to actually submit information, and I'm also seeing conflicting submission dates, so it's not clear to me if they're still accepting online submissions or not, or if they're done running roadshows, and so on. There's also multiple pages for the project, which makes sense given its multi-faceted nature, but it also makes finding the specific user submitted section a bit difficult.
(I just took another look at the main project page, and they do list additional upcoming events in 2016, so there is definitely some conflicting date information here).

The search options that come up when one goes to browse materials does work around this issue by allowing people to search by either library/museum collections only, user submitted content only, or both. It also allows for people to look at sources outside of Europe, including the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Those, however, are not crowdsourced, user submitted materials.

Overall, I like the wider scope of Europeana materials (it focuses on all major players in the War in Europe, not simply the UK), but their website is a bit more confusing for me to follow than the Great War Archive site is. That being said, the Great War Archive site is confusing in a different way, due to it hosting two archives of very similar materials from different sources. 

I think both projects are interesting, and I do like how the success of one inspired the creation and ultimate success of the other. Once once gets past some of the confusing website navigation, it does become easier to find crowdsourced materials, and it does become easier to find information about how each project worked with reaching out to the public.