Crowdsourcing for Metadata Enrichment and Outreach: Harnessing the Institutional Memory of the Crowd

This poster will present a digital initiative at the University of Scranton for a crowdsourcing platform to generate descriptive metadata for a digital collection of archival campus photographs. The goals of this initiative are to enhance the discoverability of resources through metadata enrichment and to provide an outreach opportunity to engage alumni. The crowdsourcing platform creates a space for alumni, as well as the broader campus community, to browse and interact with photographs that span four decades at the university. This project asks a community of users to share their knowledge of the people, places and events documented in the photographs to serve as access points to the digital collection. With the promise of crowdsourcing comes some larger questions for digital archivists and librarians. This poster will discuss some of the open questions for the project team: 1.) What encourages contributors to participate on crowdsourced projects? 2.) What are the potential complications with crowdsourcing? 3.) How is quality measured and success defined? and 4.) How effective is crowdsourcing as an outreach strategy?

Presenter(s): Colleen Farry, Digital Services Librarian, University of Scranton


3:20 PM