In October 2017 I went to Université d’Angers, France, for a conference on Le crowdsourcing pour partager, enrichir et publier des sources patrimoniales / Crowdsourcing as a means to share, enrich and public heritage sources.
My abstract: Ideally, cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects enable participants to explore new interests that arise as they encounter historical and scientific collections, but they must also be able to justify the resources required to run projects designed to enhance collections. This can put pressure on projects to focus on productivity at the expense of enjoyment. Beginning with an overview of successful crowdsourcing projects that introduces typical tasks and project types, this talk will discuss the tensions between designing for productivity – the number of items processed and rate of data production – and public engagement.