Six Lessons Learned from Our First Crowdsourcing Project in the Digital Humanities

At the Getty Research Institute (GRI), we think a lot about how we can provide greater access to the growing corpus of digitized materials from our special collections. This means we think a lot about metadata. Often, the metadata for our archival collections describes the collections and how they’re arranged, but not the contents. Furthermore, the field of Digital Humanities increasingly requires that we treat libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) collections as data themselves, necessitating the transformation of digitized documents into structured data. But there’s so. much. data! And so many documents!

Because of the growing volume of digitized special collections materials, LAMs are turning to crowdsourcing. Many of our peer institutions have taken on crowdsourcing initiatives with great success, including the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Transcription Center, The Huntington Library’s Decoding the Civil War project, and Tate Archive’s Anno.Tate project.

Here at the Research Institute, a lot of people were asking if crowdsourcing is a viable practice.