National Archives of Australia embraces crowdsourcing and releases ‘The Hive’.

 

The National Archives of Australia (NAA) has made a bold step into the cultural heritage crowdsourcing arena with ‘The Hive’ which was released two weeks ago. The brand makes a clever play on the word ‘Archive’ combined with the idea of a hive of working bees (the public).  The site encourages the public to transcribe archive records.

Early this year when David Fricker became Director General of the NAA he was quick to encourage staff to think innovatively, embrace change, and to harness opportunities such as crowdsourcing to improve access to our collections. He publicly spoke in favour of  crowdsourcing and a changing business model for archives at the International Council of Archives Congress in August:

“Another key development in expanding access is crowdsourcing. As many of us are now seeing, by allowing the public to contribute to the description of archival resources we are enhancing the ability of future generations to discover and learn from our archives. I also think it is a wonderful opportunity for the public to be more engaged with us as archives and to share in the work we do – preserving the memories of our nations. There is still some work to do here, in order to maximise the value of contributions and to maintain the integrity of our archives as authentic and accurate. However, I do not believe these problems are insurmountable, and indeed I believe these systems can to some extent be self-correcting.

This is a type of the co-design, citizen first activity… drawing on the interest and enthusiasm of the community to bring more of our archives into view – discoverable and retrievable…Access will be online and everywhere, improved by rich new data visualisation techniques and expanded descriptive contributions from an engaged citizenry”.

The Hive is the Archives pilot and experimentation into the potential of large scale transcription crowdsourcing to improve access to records.  Staff have looked closely at other crowdsourcing sites on offer and attempted to build on their knowledge and techniques, to provide a site that could be used as a large scale platform for a variety of transcription crowdsourcing projects.

At present the site offers just over 800 lists for the public to transcribe. Some of these are typed and some handwritten.  They are rated in difficulty as easy, medium or hard.  Part of the difficulty with this project is that the public need to have some understanding of how archives receive and describe their records to make sense of what they are being asked to do.  In simple terms archives receive vast amounts of records (referred to as consignments).  Each consignment comes with a list of the items in it.  However because of the large volume of records being received it is usual that only the consignment record is entered into the catalogue e.g. ‘100 boxes of plans and drawings’ from x government agency, rather than all the individual items on the consignment list being described in the catalogue.  The ideal scenario for users of the archives is that every item e.g. plan and drawing is described on the catalogue so that it can be found.  Without this a lot of guess work goes into finding relevant things, or alternatively personal visits are required to view the hard copy consignment lists.

 

The project that the archives is undertaking is to digitise consignment lists and then make them available for transcription by the public. Once transcribed they become searchable and the items within them can be found more easily.  Because so many of the lists are old and handwritten it is virtually impossible to get good OCR on them.  That’s where the public come in who can read them with the human eye. Also the time of the public is needed to speed up the access. Projections on the time it would take archives staff to describe the lists without public help currently stand at 210 years.  It is anticipated that a member of the public could with relative ease describe several hundred items per hour with the Hive tool, which would make a big difference, especially if there was a swarm.

The consignment lists in the pilot are those that have proved most popular with researchers and contain items in the ‘open period’, that is older than 30 years and now open to the public.  The top interest is lists of architectural drawings and historic buildings. This is closely followed by PNG patrol officer records, maritime incidents, personal records from the war office, prisoners of war, meteorology and cyclones, WW1 intelligence, and oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef.

In the first 2 weeks 300 records have been transcribed of the 800. There is a definite preference for the lists rated hard (handwritten) and ones that involve names.

The site is well presented and gives volunteer transcribers things we know they want such as progress chart, recent activity, points scoring system, rewards, optional login using Open ID e.g. their Google ID, ability to search and choose items, or just take the next one served up, to pick easy or difficult items, to add a marker for where they got to if they are interrupted, and to favourite records.  The only slight drawback is the placing of the transcription window at the bottom of the screen rather than right or left, which often means it is hard to see the transcription window and the content you are transcribing at the same time. Also the OCR text in the transcription window and the cursor is not hooked directly to the text in the image so it is easy to get lost whilst transcribing sometimes.  This is largely because most of the lists are in tables, and the table rows and columns have not been retained in the OCR, so the OCR is somewhat muddled.  Further development of the site will largely depend on feedback given by the public users, and the ability of the archives to keep up a steady supply of new, interesting digitised consignment lists to the Hive.  The Archives is still considering how it may be able to integrate the public content back into its main catalogue RecordSearch, or integrate the Hive into RecordSearch. In the meantime the list content will remain searchable in the Hive.

There is obviously an expectation from the Archives that by making its content more discoverable it will lead to more access requests.  This is why at point of transcription there is a button which enables the user to request a copy of the item.  These requests are being met by digitising the item, and then uploading them into the main catalogue ‘RecordSearch’ with the full item description.

I congratulate the National Archives of Australia Access Team on the development of this exciting new site, which holds so much potential to improve access to records and engage with our citizens in new ways.

The screenshots below show the site in action:

 Easy level transcription- Archived drawings

Medium Level Transcription - ABC Drama Scripts

 



Difficult level transcription - Plans

 



Crowdsourcing and Social Media at US National Archives (NARA). The Citizen Archivist Dashboard

Last week I attended the International Congress of Archives (ICA 2012) which was held in Brisbane. Over 1,000 Archivists from 93 countries attended.

The much anticipated opening keynote on the first day was given by David Ferriero

head of US National Archives.  He is the first librarian to become a National Archivist, previously being in charge of New York Public Library and known for promoting use of social media and relationships with Google and Wikipedia.  His talk was called ‘A world of social media’. I was looking forward to hearing what the US National Archives are doing with social media and crowdsourcing.  People were generally of the opinion that this organisation will/is leading by example in this field.

David Ferriero took to the stage and took us by surprise.  He only used 20 minutes of his 40 minute slot, gave no presentation, instead reading from his notes at breakneck speed and bombarding us with statistics that were largely out of context. At the end he took no questions and dashed off the stage.  He left a surprised and bewildered audience behind.  I for one was immensely disappointed not to see and hear more about some of the exciting US Archives activities. He of course may have had mitigating circumstances that I am totally unaware of.  He did however give small tasters of what his organisation is doing. There was brief mention of large scale crowdsourcing on unspecified projects, a citizen archivists dashboard, and a relationship with Wikipedia which peaked my interest.

So I decided to follow up online and find out for myself what may be happening at NARA. I took me quite some time to search the internet and blogs and get the information I had hoped David would give in his keynote, but it was worth it. Here is what I found:

1. Citizen Archivist Dashboard Webpage http://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/

In January 2012 the US National Archives launched the Citizen Archivist Dashboard. This is a great webpage bringing all the online and physical social engagement and crowdsourcing activities together.  It is easy for someone to see what options they may have to help the US National Archives. It is very clearly designed and I like it a lot.

 

2. Transcription Projects

• US National Archives Tool http://transcribe.archives.gov/

There are two transcription projects going on for handwritten records. Firstly the National Archives Transcription Pilot Project. It appears still to be in ‘pilot’ mode (started in January 2012) since only 300 documents (about 1,000 pages) are available for transcription. They have been very carefully selected from a collection of billions of pages and graded by colour codes according to how difficult the handwriting is to read. This pre-selection must have taken very valuable staff time. You can browse or search by difficulty of transcription, year, and the status of transcription: “Not Yet Started,” “Partially Transcribed,” and “Completed.” You then choose a page to work on and then that page is blocked to other users, so it’s not being edited by multiple users at the same time.  The interface is very simple, much like the Australian Newspapers. In a free text box beside the image you can transcribe what you see. No login is required, though you do have to complete a captcha. 

The missing part is that I can’t see how many people have transcribed what.  It’s not clear if the documents disappear from here when fully transcribed, and how and where they become full text searchable in the collection.  It also seems to be a time consuming process for NARA staff to do the pre-selection and difficulty rating of the documents. This is of course a very small pilot and hopefully lessons will be learnt and the site will be developed further to reach it’s full potential. Also it would be good if more documents became available for transcription. This is one of the easiest handwritten transcription tools I have seen.  I could not find any information about who developed the tool and if it is available open source.

Interestingly David Ferriero says that many US school children are no longer taught cursive handwriting and therefore cannot read handwriting. He says ‘Help us transcribe records and guarantee that school children can make use of our documents’. I’m not quite clear if he thinks this is a potential crowdsourcing exercise for school children to learn handwriting and become better educated, or if adults are supposed to do it so that school children can just read the finished text.

• Wikisource Tool for Wikiproject NARA. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:WikiProject_NARA

The National Archives have developed a relationship with the Wikipedia Community and currently have a Wikipedian in residence. As part of that program they have shared some primary handwritten national documents into ‘Wikisource’ for transcription via the Wikisource Tool. These documents are mostly at the beginner level in terms of difficulty. I’m not clear if they are the same ones in being used in the Archives own pilot, or different documents. I’m also not clear why they are piloting two different methods for transcription, or what the initial results are compared to each other. Wikisource offers more than transcription however, Wikipedians (if they can get access to original documents or copies) can also scan documents and OCR them.

3. Scanning Projects

• Scanathons

For reasons I don’t understand the US National Archives has only digitised 750,000 of its 40 million images. This is a very low figure for an organisation like this. They seem to be focusing quite a lot of effort on getting physical volunteers to come in person to the Archives to digitise/scan images for them at ‘Scanathons’. This started in 2011. In January 2012 there was a 4 day Wikipedia ExtravaSCANza. Over the 4 days a group of Wikipedians met in the Still Pictures Research Room and scanned 500 images on desktop scanners. Each day there was a theme: NASA, women’s history, Chile, and battleships.

• Photograph it yourself http://www.flickr.com/groups/citizenarchivist/

NARA encourages readers to take their own photos of records in the reading rooms and upload them to a special group in Flickr.  The important thing here is that they should also be described with title, series, and record group if possible so they can be found. So far only 20 people have joined the group and 133 photos have been uploaded (most of these by the same person). I’m not clear how NARA intends to link these digital images back to the item descriptions in their collections but this is a great idea to tackle large scale digitisation of images.

 

4. Tag it Tuesdays http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access/?cat=260

The tagging facility, unlike the other pilots seems to me to be unlikely to succeed in its objectives. This is perhaps because of the tight controls that have been placed around it and the isolation of the activity from normal search and browse behaviour. Whilst anyone can easily transcribe a record without needing to login the process for tagging is difficult.

The activity is focused on Tuesdays and themed around a topic.  Records for the topic are pre-selected by the Archives and available in an online group e.g. Elvis, Titanic.  Volunteers must register and follow a set of guidelines; Tags will be reviewed by NARA staff before being accepted and going live on the database. I looked at the topics and it was unclear to me why if the Archives had already identified the items as being about Elvis they couldn’t simply generate an automatic tag for ‘Elvis’. In my opinion tagging is not actually a crowdsourcing activity because individuals are motivated to add tags to help themselves find things, it is a by product of search. Research shows it is rare for users to have concensus on tag terms and use. Crowdsourcing activities achieve a big clear goal that could not be achieved by individuals alone, and everyone in the crowd should be aware of how they are helping the ultimate goal.  

5. Indexing the 1940 Census

On April 2, 2012, NARA released the digital images of the 1940 United States Federal Census after a 72 year embargo. The census images will be uploaded and made available on Archives.com, FindMyPast.com, National Archives, ProQuest, and FamilySearch.org. The entire 1940 census data will be indexed by a community of volunteers and made available for free. The free index of the census records and corresponding images will be available to the public for perpetuity.

6. Useful Links

I found a recent presentation given this year by Pamela Wright – Chief Digital Access Strategist at NARA which gives screenshots of what I have talked about above. ‘From access to engagement’

7. Social Media

NARA are active users of social media channels and they have started to monitor their activity. The Social media statistics from NARA May 2012 may be interesting reading for some.

I would be interested in reading more presentations or articles about the citizen archivist pilot projects from NARA and finding out what they have achieved and learnt so far. I hope this information is made available to the archives and library community soon.  Please reply in comment if you have any more information on the pilot activities.