National Digital Library of India

I was recently invited to travel to UNESCO HQ in New Delhi, India to give a keynote presentation at the UNESCO-National Digital Library of India International Workshop  ‘Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library Design’.  A small group of professional international experts had been invited to share their knowledge in the area of their expertise, mine being crowdsourcing in libraries, newspaper text correction and user led digital library design.

The Government of India along with the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IITK) are working on a project to develop the National Digital Library (NDL).  This is going to be an important part of their national academic infrastructure and is being led by Professor Partha Chakrabarti from IITK.  The question they really wanted me to answer for Trove and Australian Newspapers was “if you were doing it all again, starting now, what would you do differently”? This is so they can apply the knowledge that Australia learnt in the Indian Digital Library project.

Unlike other countries India has a growing young, rather than old population and they are not able to build and expand their universities in a timely way to meet educational demand.  Therefore the government are seeing the National Digital Library as an academic network for individual and community based learning. It mainly contains books and courses and they will shortly develop the module to deliver historic newspapers.  Academic libraries are also having their subscription resources harvested into it, since it is intended to be the backbone of the academic learning network.  It shares some similarities with the Australian equivalent Trove. This interesting explains the National Digital Library of India.

I was really pleased to find out that India are now utilising their technology expertise for themselves in this way.  If it was not for India we would not have Trove and Australian Newspapers.  The National Library of Australia has been sending the more technical workflow aspects of the historic newspaper digitisation out to India contractors for the last ten years. In 2008 I was overseeing this and I had the pleasure to visit the digitisation facilities and meet the hundreds of staff in Hyderabad, Chennai, and Delhi, as well as some of the call centres and technology companies in Kolcatta.  It was an eye opening experience for me to see such cutting edge technology and bright young people filled with hope and career aspirations, alongside with such extreme poverty and slums.  India is an experience that lets you see the whole of humanity in a single day, which can be quite overwhelming.

UNSW has just started to make a series of targeted and highly strategic investments in developing transformative partnerships in India. India represents a major priority for UNSW as part of its 2025 Strategy under the Global Impact pillar.  Building successful research and knowledge exchange partnerships in India will be key to the success of the UNSW India Strategy. India is a growing source of innovation and is home to some of the world’s most dynamic and innovative companies who are at the forefront of digital disruption, social enterprise and inclusive development. India’s research system is also growing as the Government of India considers its investment and capacity building strategy in higher education and research.

This week for Diwali the UNSW campus is being transformed and ‘The Festival of India 2017’ will be a stimulating, event-packed week that celebrates and promotes Australia’s partnership and friendship with the rapidly emerging global powerhouse – India. As the campus grounds transform into a little India – this unique festival will showcase not only the country’s rich, cultural offerings but also its ground breaking developments in innovation, finance, scientific research and economic growth.  In November there will be an inaugural Research Roadshow:

• To enable UNSW researchers to travel to India to make new connections and/or strengthen existing relationships;
• To showcase UNSW’s capabilities, especially in the following research areas: smart cities, energy, water, climate, health and social enterprise sectors to prospective Indian partners.
• To initiate and nurture strategic industry partnerships that will lead to knowledge exchange outcomes.

Expected outcomes will be the identification or consolidation of opportunities that will lead to future collaborative research partnerships with academic, industry and government partners.

In the meantime as I contemplated preparing my presentation I unfortunately was one of the many Australian’s struck down with the virulent strain of influenza in the recent Australia wide outbreak of flu.  As the time approached to travel I realised I really was still not well enough.  This resulted in me asking the Creative Media Unit at UNSW Canberra for help. John Carroll used his wonderful skill and technologies to create a 40 minute video of my presentation which was delivered to New Delhi on video screen, link below.

I discuss the findings of my nine years of research into crowdsourcing based curation in libraries.  Using the digitised historic Australian Newspapers as an example, I look at how the functionality and interface was developed in close relationship with the users,  and how this led on to text correction of newspaper articles. It is nearly ten years since this pioneering project began and the motivations and achievements of the 50,000 volunteers are examined over this time. I question how successfully the goal of improving text quality and therefore search has been achieved?  I propose that if a similar project was begun now then artificial intelligence software would be used such as OverProof post OCR correction tool to improve the quality of the text.  OverProof has been trained on the manual corrections of the Australian newspaper corpus and trials demonstrate it is able to dramatically improve the quality of the corpus. Volunteer text correction could still continue afterwards for difficult text but the software would do the main donkey work, allowing users to have a better quality search.

The PowerPoint is on my slideshare account.

Crowdsourcing text correction and transcription of digitised historic newspapers: a list of sites

Last month two new websites were launched giving the public access to digitised historic newspapers.  The release of a new ‘old’ digitised newspaper site is becoming a regular monthly occurrence now, with a library somewhere in the world completing a newspaper digitisation project with astonishing regularity, after what seems like such a long wait. 

The two new sites this month were the Welsh Newspapers online and the Louiseville Leader.

The Welsh site has been several years in progress and seriously considered using the National Library of Australia software for text correction, before putting it in the ‘too hard basket’. The National Library of Wales is to be commended on making the Welsh Newspapers service free (unlike the English newspapers which are still in a subscription model from the British Library).

 

The Louiseville site delivers all the issues of a key African American community newspaper covering local, national, and international news published in Louisville, Kentucky from 1917-1950. Unfortunately the building which housed original copies of the paper was badly damaged by a fire. The remaining issues, loaned by Kentucky State University and the widow of the publisher, were microfilmed by the University of Louisville, with the digital files created from that microfilm. The long and winding road the texts have taken toward digital representation has made them less than ideal candidates for optical character recognition (OCR), which has difficulty transcribing faded, torn, or misaligned texts, even when they are readable to the human eye. For this reason the site has enabled public transcription to help improve the accuracy and searchability of the newspaper content.

 

It’s great to see both of these new sites and I fully understand the difficult process many libraries have gone through to get to this point, having been there and managed a newspaper digitisation project myself. I still have a particular interest in those newspaper sites which involve the public in text correction, which is another step perhaps just too challenging for many libraries to take.  After the worldwide library applaud of the Australian Newspapers/Trove text correction beta five years ago, now an internationally hailed success, and the stated intent of many libraries to follow suit with public text correction the question arises “how many actual did?”

 

There are many libraries internationally that now offer websites to search across digitised historic newspapers and I’m not going to list all of them, just the handful that give their users the text correction or transcription ability. With Australian text correctors, now addicted to text correction of newspapers and looking elsewhere to sate their ample appetites I thought it was time to compile a list specifically of text correction websites for historic newspapers. To the best of my knowledge there are 9 sites now.  Who will be the 10th?? If I have inadvertently missed a site perhaps let me know in the comments. Most of the sites are for English language content but it is interesting to see a few coming through for other languages.  As a note of interest there were several foreign language historic newspapers published in Australia (Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, German) but these were put in the ‘too hard basket’ for the first stage of Australian Newspapers/Trove and sadly did not make it into the second stage either.  They give a very interesting perspective on sub communities within a wider community.

 

Congratulations to all the libraries listed below who took the first difficult step to digitise and then the more challenging step to crowdsource. Happy text correcting to all the amazing people that volunteer their valuable time to help libraries make old newspapers more accessible, I hope you enjoy the list. The sites are all slightly different but work on the general basis of showing a digitised page and asking for public correction/transcription of the OCR text created from that page. If the OCR text is improved then keyword searching of the newspapers is improved.  It particularly helps to correct people’s names, especially in family notices, births and deaths, since these are often the first thing that users search on.

 

List of historic/old digitised newspaper sites that offer public text correction/transcription: March 2013

US Newspapers

• Correct the Louiseville Leader (from the University of Louiseville Library) http://digital.library.louisville.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/leader/
• Correct California newspapers (from the University of California Library) at http://cdnc.ucr.edu
• Correct Cambridge Massachusetts newspapers (from the Cambridge Public Library) at http://bit.ly/cambridgepublic
• Correct Tennessee newspapers (from the University of Tennessee Library) http://tndp.lib.utk.edu
• Correct Virginia newspapers (from the State Library of Virginia Library) http://virginiachronicle.com

 

Australian Newspapers

• Correct Australian newspapers (from the National Library of Australia) http://trove.nla.gov.au

Finnish Newspapers

• Correct Finnish newspapers (from the National Library of Finland) in Finnish http://digi.lib.helsinki.fi/sanomalehti

Vietnamese Newspapers

• Vietnamese newspapers (from the National Library of Vietnam) in Vietnamese http://bit.ly/nationallibraryofvietnam

Russian

• Russian language periodicals http://bit.ly/russianperiodicals in Russian

 

Useful Resource:

Frederick Zarndt’s recent PowerPoint on crowdsourcing in libraries with a particular focus on newspapers:

http://www.slideshare.net/cowboyMontana/20130321-putting-the-worlds-cultural-heritage-online-with-crowdsourcing-rootstech-2013-17384937

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

 



Digital Motor Archive available free for the month of October in return for…...

It came to my notice last week that a publisher in the UK had digitised both the current and back issues of their magazine the ‘Commercial Motor’ which in its early life was a newspaper. In the cut throat world of publishing there are few publishers left that are still publishing the same title they were 100 years ago, and who also have a complete set of back copies.  If they fall into this bracket they are in the unique position of being able to either digitise the content themselves for their readers (usually at a loss); offer it to a library to digitise (at no cost); or sell it to a commercial e-vendor to package with another product for academia (and make a profit).  Unfortunately most choose the latter, which makes this type of content only really accessible to academics and students via academic libraries.  E-vendors normally charge high subscription rates to digitised magazines and newspapers and package them up with other content, making it only viable for large universities and national libraries to purchase, and therefore severely restricting readership to the content.

Not a lot of publishers are digitising their own content because generally speaking the cost of preparation, digitisation and OCR, and building a good website to deliver the content outweigh the amount of money they would ever recuperate from reader subscriptions. Normally a subscription to the current copy would be packaged up with old copies.  And that’s where the model fails, because often current readers have no interest in the old stuff.  People who do have an interest in the old stuff are generally a different group of people – historians, researchers etc.  The exception to this rule appears to be anything to do with hobbies such as knitting, cooking, railways, cars, and stamps. 

The Commercial Motor Archive http://archive.commercialmotor.com/ came to my notice because it is available for free for the month of October and I wondered why. It is a rich archive going from 1905 to the present day, covering a complete century and two world wars, well illustrated and with everything you ever wanted to know about commercial vehicles.   

The search and browse mechanism is very impressive and works well.  For example articles on pages have been zoned so you can search and find the article easily within a page.  It has many similarities to the hugely popular Australian Newspapers http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper.  The page displays alongside the OCR text to make it easier to read. You can browse covers, browse by date, and zoom in on pages.  Results can be filtered. Users can add comments and tags.  The quality of the OCR text and therefore search is very good.

It has one thing that was never implemented on Australian Newspapers (though often asked for by users) which is a little box on each page called ‘Report an error’ and this is the reason for its free access.  The site owner is hoping that as people use and read the pages in the archive they will report errors as they see them, and for this they get free access to the content.  The known errors that need to be identified are incomplete articles (where the zoning has gone wrong); OCR text error in headlines of articles; and OCR errors in text. However readers can only report them, not actually fix them.  The site states:

“the archive is beta because it isn’t perfect at the moment and there are a few glitches to be ironed out. Every article page has a 'Noticed an error?' button you can use to report a problem. Please don’t expect an immediate change to the error - we gather all the reports together and prioritise them, fixing the most pressing errors first.”

It sounds like they don’t know how many errors there are, how many people will report errors, and who and how the errors will be fixed.  Interesting.

Although the ‘report an error’ button was never implemented on Australian Newspapers (it was mainly needed to report upside down and duplicate pages) it had already been decided that a ‘super user’ would be the person to review these reports and take action.  In a world where some volunteer text correctors wanted to take on extra responsibility and have special roles like the hierarchy in the Wikipedia editors community this would have been a good thing for trusted volunteers to do.

The Commercial Motor Archive has impressed me because they are clearly striving for perfection, they understand that the fewer mistakes there are the better the search will be and they have taken a brave step by asking the public to help in return for free access.  This is indeed unusual for a commercial publisher, belonging more in the realms of libraries and archives and referred to as crowdsourcing……

 

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.

If only they would crowdsource! – Diamond Jubilee - Royal Archives at Windsor Castle

Many years ago I worked for a software company installing the first archive management systems into large UK archives such as the London Metropolitan Archives, Cumbria Archives at Carlisle Castle and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.  It was a challenging time for archives going from paper systems to computer systems, in fact very similar to the challenges archives now face transitioning from managing paper records to born digital records.  Ironically I have just returned again to the archives sector and am now working at the National Archives of Australia on the second challenge.

When the first computer systems were installed in archives it often came as a shock to archivists to discover that when the system was installed it would be ‘empty’ and their records would not somehow miraculously appear in the system. This was the first piece of news I usually had to convey in training before showing an online process for acquisitions. I particularly remember that at the Royal Archives they estimated with their current staff of 4 it would take them 700 years to record their archive collection into their new system, and they were somewhat despondent to say the least. Nevertheless the Queen was pleased with the install of the first computerised system at Windsor Castle and awarded the software company I worked for the Royal Warrant, which meant we could use the Royal Coat of Arms on our letterhead.  The warrant is more often seen on pots of jam and pickle than on software. The celebration of implementation party at Windsor Castle with members of the Royal Household and staff was one to remember. 

The Round Tower at Windsor Castle contained every hand written record every monarch and members of their household had ever created. Queen Victoria’s collection was particularly large.  The Royal Archives could only be contacted by letter and each year less than 10 well vetted members of the public were allowed to access a very restricted and pre-agreed part of the collection under strict supervision.  Because it was largely uncatalogued, described or known there was a terrible fear of what a member of the public might find in the archives. This was understandable since household records such as the cost of banquets were intermingled with personal letters and diaries.  From the public's point of view the archive is that of our Kings and Queens and we would like to access it, but from HRH's view it is her private family archive. Although it is now more acceptable to expose skeletons in the family closet and programs such as "Who do you think you are" promote this, there is probably a reticence from aristocracy and royalty to do this. The Royal Archives is one of the richest, most interesting and significant collections ever created.  It could aptly be described as a pot of gold – an absolute treasure trove. The archivists were aware of this and some of the treasures within it.  The Royal Library at Windsor Castle was in a similar situation and also had extremely restricted access.  Because I have always championed access to archive and library collections I felt very sad whenever I thought of the treasures locked up and hidden (literally) at Windsor Castle.

I was very interested therefore to read about a new development at the Royal Archives timed to coincide with the Diamond Jubilee.  The Queen released this message:

“In this the year of my Diamond Jubilee, I am delighted to be able to present, for the first time, the complete on-line collection of Queen Victoria's journals from the Royal Archives. These diaries cover the period from Queen Victoria's childhood days to her Accession to the Throne, marriage to Prince Albert, and later, her Golden and Diamond Jubilees. Thirteen volumes in Victoria's own hand survive, and the majority of the remaining volumes were transcribed after Queen Victoria's death by her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, on her mother's instructions. It seems fitting that the subject of the first major public release of material from the Royal Archives is Queen Victoria, who was the first Monarch to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee. It is hoped that this historic collection will make a valuable addition to the unique material already held by the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University, and will be used to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the past.”

I was intrigued by this and immediately found the website http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do which tells us a lot more about Queen Victoria’s diaries and that this was a project undertaken in conjunction with the Bodleian Library at Oxford and Pro-Quest.  However on looking further it was a bit disappointing since although every page of all the journals has been scanned they have not all been transcribed.  Because they are all handwritten, they won’t be fully text searchable until they are all transcribed, a process which at present is most effectively done by the human hand and eye.  The website doesn’t give any indication of when or how they will be transcribed that I could see, although it says it ‘is in progress’. So far only the first diary has been transcribed, by whom I am not sure. I bet the project is only letting academics do it, who will be paid lots of money and progress very slowly. There is a lot to do: 1832- 1901 since Queen Victoria wrote her diary every day.

If ever I saw a collection that was so well-suited to crowdsourcing for public transcription this is it!  I could guarantee that in a few days or weeks all of Queen Victoria’s diaries would be transcribed by a willing and fascinated public. The handwriting is hard to decipher but with thousands of eyes, and amateur/professional genealogists and historians used to reading old writing, that are highly motivated I am sure it could be achieved. I feel excited just imagining it.  But why stop there?  What about the rest of the collection - the offical royal records and the personal records?  When is that going to come out of hiding? It’s just crying out for public description, tagging and transcribing. If only.  If only.

Extract of Queen Victoria’s diary.

Then thinking I would come back later and have another look I was most disappointed to read that following the example set by the British Library with its UK digitised newspapers the intent is to restrict access to the UK only, and to charge for access from July.  So loyal British subjects living in Commonwealth Countries, and academic researchers – you only have 14 more days to look at this for free, or at all.  Great shame!  But congratulations to whoever it was behind the scenes that convinced HRH to release the diaries from the Royal Archives, and who set up and managed the project with the Bodleian and Pro-Quest.  Bravo!!  Perhaps we just need to beg and grovel for more content and offer our unconditional help to get it for free.

Photo by Rose. June 2012. After participating in Trooping the Colour for the Queens Birthday in Canberra, Irish Guard Cliff Doidge (who plays the clarinet in the Royal Military Band and is on exchange from London to Australia for 4 months) stands beside Lake Burley Griffin with the National Library of Australia behind.

Libraries harnessing the cognitive surplus of the nation

It was with great pleasure that I accepted an invitation to lunch at the Parliament of New South Wales last week with Her Excellency Marie Bashir, the Governor of NSW.  The lunch was in memory of Jean Arnot, forward thinking librarian. In her memory each year a female librarian is awarded a prize for the best essay on librarianship. This year I was the JeanArnot Memorial Fellowship prize winner for my essay:  ‘Harnessing the cognitive surplus of the nation: new opportunities for libraries in a time of change’.

The judges said

“your essay was energetic and passionate, and argued cogently for your position, which obviously has significant import for the Library profession”.

The essay was an amalgamation of my ideas, research and practice over the last 4 years into crowdsourcing in libraries.  Although it is aimed at librarians it is equally relevant to archivists. The essay focuses on the idea of cognitive surplus and how and why libraries urgently need to tap into this opportunity. ‘Cognitive surplus’ is a phrase coined by the author and academic Clay Shirky (whose mother is a librarian). It means the free time that people have in which they could be creative or use their brain.  Many people spend their ‘cognitive surplus’ time by watching hours of television, gaming, surfing the internet or reading. However, due to the increased availability of the internet in households, the rise of social media technology, and the desire of people to be creative rather than consumptive, there is now a major change in use of cognitive surplus time. People want to produce and share just as much if not more than consume. Due to new forms of online collaboration and participation, people are seeking out and becoming very productive in online social endeavours. Clay Shirky hypothesizes in his books that there is huge potential for creative human endeavour if the billions of hours that people watch TV are channelled into useful causes instead.

I suggest that libraries can and should harness this cognitive surplus to save themselves. Four powerful examples of libraries harnessing cognitive surplus are:

2008. The National Library of Australia set an international example of how to harness the cognitive surplus of the nation with the Australian Newspapers service. The community is able to improve the computer generated text in digitised historic newspapers by a ‘text correction’ facility, thereby improving the search results in the service. 40,000 people have corrected 52 million lines of text.

2010. The National Library of Finland was the second library to implement community newspaper text correction in their Digitalkoot crowdsourcing project. So far 50,000 people have corrected the text to 99% accuracy.

2011. The New York Public Library released ‘What’s on the menu?’, a crowdsourcing project where the community transcribe text from digitised menus held in the library’s collection. So far 800,000 dishes have been transcribed from 12,000 menus, making them full-text searchable.

2012. The Bodleian Library released the fourth large scale library crowdsourcing project this year. ‘What’s the score?’ is a project where the community can help describe the vast music score collection at Oxford.

If the library profession leverages our expertise with technology and collaboratively harnesses the cognitive surplus of the community we will be able to develop, expand, and open our collections. We will be able to enhance and preserve the social history of the nation while meeting the ever-changing needs of our society. By engaging the community, libraries can develop projects of equal scale, quality and output of commercial endeavours.

The survival of libraries is under threat and I believe that gaining the help of our community with their ideas, knowledge, skills, time and money is the answer. To remain relevant and valued in society libraries must look at their collections and communities in new, imaginative and open ways.  We have the technology to do whatever we want. We must change our culture and thinking to embrace new opportunities such as crowdsourcing on a mass scale.  The value and relevance of libraries is two-fold. It lies in both our collections and in the community that creates, uses, and values these collections. Let us demonstrate this and our place in it. Let us hold onto our original values of open access to all, and do whatever it takes to remain core, valued and relevant in society.

I would encourage you to read the full essay, pass it onto your colleagues, think about this idea deeply and work out how you can harness cognitive surplus to help your profession and organisation in the immediate future.

Photo: Women reach for the skies, big opportunities are out there….

This Andrew Rodgers sculpture was unveiled at Canberra airport on 2 April 2012.  It is the largest bronze figurative sculpture in Australia and is called ‘Perception and Reality 1’.

Church archive starts crowdsourcing: help tag sermon podcasts

There are many church and cathedral archives around the world but a particular one that has just caught my eye and held my interest is All Souls Anglican Church at Langham Place, London. This is because of a crowdsourcing project it has started.  It is setting a fine example for other cathedral and church archives to follow. In a blog post last week the church appealed for Christian volunteers to help make the archive more accessible and used.  The church upholds the principles of information access, strongly believing that resources it generates should be free and open to the community. The church puts its current sermons and talks up on its website as podcasts.  However they have a large back archive of sermons: 3,600 to be precise.  As far as I can see these are all available as podcasts.  To increase their usage and make them more findable they want the community to add subject tags to them. There is a webpage explaining how to do this.  

I followed through to see how simple the process would be.  It is pretty simple and easy to do, but there are a couple of surprising things here.  Firstly it is assumed that only one person needs to allocate tags to a sermon and they will put the ‘right’ tags on. Because of this once someone has ‘grabbed’ a series of sermons to tag no-one else can pick them as far as I could see.  This may have been set up like this because they may have thought that not enough people would sign up to help. However even though the call for help only went out last week, there are very few sermon series left that haven’t been grabbed. I think they have under anticipated the interest and enthusiasm of the crowd here.  Personally I think it may be helpful to encourage more than one person to add tags to the same sermon.  The general premise in crowdsourcing is to use the wisdom of the crowd. This is particularly relevant for tagging.  In order to choose tags the sermon or talk needs to be listened to first. This takes about 30 minutes for each one.

The next interesting thing is that the volunteers can pick 3-4 tags from a very small controlled list and then they have a chance to add one tag of their own choosing that is not on the list.  That one tag will be moderated by the archivist (and presumably added to the list if deemed suitable and often used).  This is the first time that I have seen a combination tagging approach. Again I’m not quite sure about the thinking behind this. I would like to know more. This is a very interesting project to me because firstly it is a small controlled experiment into crowdsourcing where it will be very easy to report back to the community on results, levels of activity and lessons learned.  If successful as I am sure it will be, it could easily be replicated in other church archives, or widened for other item types in the church archive.  It is also a demonstration of how to make audio-visual content better searchable, as well as calling on a specific group of the community – Christians. 

I am really interested to hear more about the results and lessons learned from this small experiment.

Photo: I was lost and parked the car to consult the map when I noticed the car in front of me, it gave me a chuckle…



Crowdsourcing transcription of handwritten archives

One of the big differences between libraries and archives is that libraries tend to have more of ‘the printed word’ whilst archives have vast amounts of ‘the handwritten record’.  While some libraries are getting up to speed with mass digitisation of books and journals and then being able to offer users full text searchable digitised items, this is still a distant dream for most archives.  Some archives are undertaking mass digitisation, but the second step – making handwritten records full-text searchable is a massive challenge.  The reason for this is in the technology and processing steps.

After scanning a ‘printed word’ page into an image file a piece of software called Optical CharacterRecognition (OCR) converts the image into searchable text.  The OCR works best with clean, clear, black and white typeface such as a word document or a book, not quite so well on old books and journals, and very poorly on old newspapers.  When it comes to converting handwriting it fails miserably.  It just can’t distinguish and convert handwriting to text in the way the human eye can.  Therefore archives can’t easily automate the second part of the digitisation process using OCR software like libraries can for the printed word.

If you at least get some OCR text from print that is readable and therefore searchable you can offer a service to users to full-text search the books or journals such as Google does. If the OCR text is poor there are some things you can do to improve it. You can encourage users of your service to correct the OCR text with a text correction tool so that the searching is improved, such as Trove does with the Australian Newspapers.

Unfortunately the only viable option open to archives to convert digital images into full-text searchable text is to use a manuscript transcription tool, in combination with harnessing the power of a crowd to do the transcription work.  The transcription work for handwritten records is much harder than for example text correcting old newspapers because the handwriting is often difficult to read, old fashioned, barely legible and not necessarily structured in lines or columns. There is often nothing to go on.

I recently stumbled across a blog all about manuscript transcription tools that is written by a software developer Ben W Brumfield in Texas. Ben developed his own software to transcribe his great-great grandmother’s journal. ‘FromthePage’ is now being used by archives because Ben has made it available open source.

A year ago he wrote an in-depthblog post that covered manuscript transcription tools under development, manuscript transcription projects in archives, and made some predications for future directions of manuscript transcription.  I am not going to repeat what he said here, I suggest you read the post in full.  He notes that software development in this area is still fragmented and young with no particular tools taking dominance. Most developed applications are being made available open source. A standout is ‘Scribe’ from the Zooniverse team, currently being used by both the ‘Old Weather’ project to transcribe maritime weather records and by ‘What’s the score’ project to transcribe music scores at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Before an archive implements a manuscript tool it needs to find out what it’s users  would most like to be easily full-text searchable from the vast vaults of all the content it has. It is important to find this out, because the crowd will only be motivated and swell in numbers if they really feel what they are doing is very important to a broad group of people and really matters either right now, or in the long-term and is also interesting.  They have to feel this before they will join in.  Once they have joined in there are other motivational tips you can do to keep them going.  Just implementing a manuscript tool is simply not enough.  You need to engage, watch, understand and learn from your crowd, for they hold the passion and power in their hands to make your project successful or not.

Photo by Rose Holley, outside Canberra Bus Station

Crowdsourcing Australian Climate Change

In my last blog post I described how knitters and yarn enthusiasts were crowdsourcing knitting patterns from digitised Australian newspapers in Trove for use in a crowdsourcing site called Ravelry http://www.ravelry.com.  This week I wanted to give another example of the Australian Newspapers in Trove giving leverage to yet another crowdsourcing site. This time it’s for research into climate change and the site is called OzDocs. http://ozdocs.climatehistory.com.au/

Australian newspapers hold unique content, for example convict records and climate records. In Australia official weather records only began in 1908 when the Bureau of Meteorology was established. However there are weather tables and forecasts appearing in Australian newspapers from 1803 onwards.  The newspapers therefore provide 200 years of weather records.  Newspapers not only give tables with statistics of temperature, rainfall, winds etc, but also eye witness accounts of weather conditions such as floods, droughts and fire.

The citizens and politicians of Australia have a high and ongoing level of interest in climate change and how it is affecting our nation. A project investigating climate change is SEARCH: SouthEastern Australian Recent Climate History. It spans the sciences and the humanities, drawing together a team of leading climate scientists, water managers and historians in Australia to better understand south-eastern Australian climate history over the past 200–500 years. The digital newspapers in Trove are a fundamental part of SEARCH’s research process. However even though the newspapers are full-text searchable it is still a challenge to find and bring together in context the eye-witness accounts and the weather tables so that the temperatures, rainfall and other statistics can be transcribed into a research database. This is why the SEARCH project has established this month the OzDocs citizen science project, with a $10,000 grant from the University of Melbourne so that the public can help them. Basically the public are asked to find and tag historic newspaper articles on weather conditions, and transcribe useful weather statistics from historic newspapers into a database.

In 2010 Joelle Gergis, the lead SEARCH investigator spoke to me and said:

“Having all this information online and being able to quickly access it has been amazing. Being able to find weather tables from 1803 onwards in the Sydney Gazette is crucial to our research. Official records from the Bureau of Meteorology only began 100 years ago so being able to access the newspaper records which are earlier than this is really useful. The sources in Trove also show how weather events have affected society, with eye witness accounts of floods and bushfires. For example we have been researching the 1851 Black Thursday bushfires in Victoria.”

In 2010 as a locust plague swept across the south-eastern side of Australia the pilot volunteers for the project working at the State Library of New South Wales noted that weather conditions in 1825 were very similar (heavy rainfall followed by nice weather then a terrible locust plague) and found eye-witness accounts in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 24 March 1825 of a similar locust plague.

“Prior to the late rains the caterpillar, that old enemy to the agriculturist interest of the Colony, made its appearance ; but, upon the visitation of the heavy showers, their ranks were consider ably thinned. However, since the present enchanting fine weather has again set in, the number of these destructive insects has increased to an unparalleled extent, covering whole fields in their course, which in some spots seemed to be towards the South, in a line from East to West. Wherever they make their appearance, the most complete destruction immediately follows. Upon Captain Campbell’s estate, in the district of Cooke, they were supposed to be at least two inches in height.”

This month I caught up with Joelle again to see how the newly released crowdsourcing part of the project is going. She said:

“We now have over 100 volunteers who have contributed over 4000 articles. The database will be searchable in our next release. It will be the country’s first publicly searchable database of climate information using a diverse collection of pre-20th century historical records. The database will give easy access to information for researchers, organisations, government departments and the public.”

The scope of OzDocs work has now been expanded to include not only the digitised newspapers but other resources that are held in the State Library of Victoria, State Library of New South Wales and the National Library of Australia.  These pre-date the newspapers by another 100 years and go back to the 1700’s. Joelle said:

“Our OzDocs volunteers will be working their way through logbooks of the first European explorers, governors’ correspondence, early settlers’ diaries, newspapers and the works of 18th and 19th century scholars.”

On of the questions the SEARCH project hopes to answer is what the South East region of Australia’s ‘natural’ climate has been like since 1788. This may ultimately help to refine current climate models, allowing more accurate climate change estimates to be developed for the future.  The lack of records in a consistent accessible format before 1900 is currently making this difficult.

For the project to be successful the volunteer numbers really need to increase a lot.  At the moment this is still quite a small scale effort compared to the knitting project Ravelry that I reported on in my last blog.  Volunteers can join by accessing the OzDocs site. http://ozdocs.climatehistory.com.au/