Crowdsourcing: Social Engagement

Words: 777
Pages: 4

What is crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is a form of social engagement between an entity and a group of external users working towards a shared goal. This collaboration aims to make the completion of this shared goal which is usually too complex for the entity to complete on its own achievable. By working as a group this quite substantial goal or task is more easily accomplished and in a shorter time. Tina BudziseWeaver, Jiangping Chen & Mikhaela Mitchell (Collaboration and Crowdsourcing)

It is not accurate to define crowdsourcing as social engagement but it does use social engamement tools. Social engagement is about communication channels between an entity and an external group of users wheras crowdsourcing goes further and uses social engagement
…show more content…
Add this to the workload of an archival institution who is also trying to make their paper records digitally accessible and you can see why they are struggling to keep up with their programs. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march10/holley/03holley.html

Even though the highly specialised work of archivists can never be replaced by a voluntary crowdsourcing group of enthusiasts, they can help greatly in the highly volumous tasks in the digitisation process as well as the retrieval process by tagging images, adding descriptive information to records, contributing to meta data and generally making the records highly findable and valuable to the end user.
…show more content…
I have therefore been compelled to focus on this case study in greater detail throughout this research paper. I will be analysing the literature relating to crowdsourcing and how it relates back to this particular case study of the HIVE, short for ArcHIVE, which is the name given to the program.

Overview of ArcHIVE:

The National Archives of Australia's digitization program produces between 50 to 1000 new digital records per day on average. There are about 15,000 records loaded onto the NAA's system each month many of these being images. This large volume is stretching the archives to it's limits and not enough time and resources are available to make these new digital records findable. http://blog.naa.gov.au/labs/soda-stream-of-digital-archives/

When David Fricker, the Director General of the NAA spoke at the International Council of Archives Congress in 2012 he indicated that he wanted to embrace change and harness the power of crowdsourcing by allowing members of the public to contribute to the descriptions of images and transcribe scanned text documents thereby enhancing the records and making them more findable.