Last month, John Dougan and I presented this talk at the Best Practices Exchange conference at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. This blog post contains our slides and talk notes, with John's presentation followed by mine. [John Dougan] Over the last three decades the Missouri State Archives has maintained a robust distance volunteer indexing program that we now … [Read more...] about Mistakes We Make: Crowdsourcing and Quality Control
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Imbalanced Volunteer Engagement
Last month, I read "Imbalanced volunteer engagement in cultural heritage crowdsourcing: a task-related exploration based on causal inference", by Zhang, Zhang, Zhao and Zhu. The authors analyzed the Trove crowdsourcing platform at the National Library of Australia to look for patterns in contributions by volunteers correcting the OCR text of old newspaper articles. While I … [Read more...] about Imbalanced Volunteer Engagement
Your First Crowdsourcing Project
Last September, Ben and Sara Brumfield hosted a webinar on your first crowdsourcing project. The presentation, linked below in a video and embedded as slides, covers selecting material, finding volunteers, developing transcription conventions, keeping volunteers engaged, and what to do with your transcriptions once you're done. You can sign up for future … [Read more...] about Your First Crowdsourcing Project
How can my archive crowdsource record indexing?
Last May, Ben and Sara Brumfield hosted a webinar on successful crowdsourced indexing. The presentation, linked below in a video and embedded as slides, presents a walkthrough of how project staff selected material, recruited volunteers, developed instructions, encouraged engagement, and used volunteer contributions to improve public access. You can sign up for future … [Read more...] about How can my archive crowdsource record indexing?
What to Do When Your Transcribers Can’t Read Cursive
One of the common complaints I hear is that young volunteers or students can’t read cursive. While it’s true that many students are not taught cursive as part of their school curriculum, that isn't an insurmountable barrier to participating in a transcription project. The medieval and early modern transcription projects on FromThePage are written in scripts that no one uses … [Read more...] about What to Do When Your Transcribers Can’t Read Cursive