Date
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
Session Type
General: 60 min
Name
Collective Intelligence: Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing and Increasing Accessibility
Description

Cultural institutions have experimented with, and invested in, crowdsourcing over the last decade; perhaps most notably on transcription projects such as the Smithsonian Transcription Center, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza project, and the Freedmen’s Bureau project. Transcription is still one of the core tasks offered on crowdsourcing platforms, however, more tasks than transcription can be leveraged to enrich collections. This presentation looks at metadata crowdsourcing projects as a way to expand access points and enhance representation by framing these projects as a mission centric engaging activity with the public. 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. I will present 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 institution’s official accounts.

Track
Accessibility