Katie Rawson andTrevor Muñoz are scholars researching questions about food and culture using the historical menu collections from the New York Public Library. In this interview, learn more about their project, Curating Menus, and what they've learned from working with the library's data. Katie Rawson is the CLIR Bollinger Fellow in Library Innovation at the [...]
Since its debut in 2001, the free-access and free-content online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become a huge cultural force, filled with millions of articles in 250 different languages. Accessed some 500 million times per moth, and boasting over 26 million registered "citizen editor," Wikipedia would seem to be the ultimate in democratic knowledge-sharing. That is, until [...]
If you've happened to visit the Cooper Hewitt since its recent renovation, you'll have noticed a complete transformation of the visitor experience into a participatory digital experience that puts museum items right into the palm of the hand. At the center of this considerable technical challenge was Micah Walter of the museum's digital team. He [...]
In this first installment of a two-part interview, Cooper Hewitt's Micah Walter discusses the value of making a museum's data more "open" and available for public use. Opening Museum Data Micah explains that the Cooper Hewitt decided several years ago to take the bold step of opening up its collection data via API and licensing [...]
Afrocrowd is a new initiative which seeks to increase the number of people of African Descent who actively partake in the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture and software movements. Above, Executive Director Alice Backer explains why diversity is so important in crowdsourcing initiatives in this advance look at our interview. Stay tuned until next week when [...]
[http://www.mukurtu.org] Kim Christen Withey, Mukurtu, Washington State University I’m going to talk about three best practices: ethical exchange, collaborative curation, and sustained support. I like alliterations obviously. These grow out of my role as project director of Mukurtu, which is a free and open source content management system built with the needs of indigenous communities in mind, but I think these are just [...]
[http://www.birds.cornell.edu] Tina Phillips, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is probably best known for creating and implementing the traditional form of citizen science where people go and collect lots of data out in the field and share it with scientists who are interested in answering some questions. I have been there for about 16 years and in [...]
[https://www.zooniverse.org] Chris Lintott, Zooniverse, Oxford University I think I’m here because we’ve run 44 Zooniverse projects, so you’d think I’d have some sense of what best practice is, but the truth is we are still in a phase where I can point you at stuff that doesn’t work and tell you what we are trying to do to fix that. We [...]
[http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com] [http://beta.fromthepage.com] Ben Brumfield, Collaborative Manuscript Transcription I’d like to draw in pretty deeply on one best practice. The best practice I would like to talk about today is turning the product of the crowdsourcing effort back to the volunteer. Now what do I mean by “product”? I’m not talking about the final product, the item-level finding aids, the published research papers, and [...]
[http://www.hathitrust.org] Jeremy York, HathiTrust I have just prepared to talk about some of the challenges that we have faced in HathiTrust, and I will just go ahead and do that. I am really glad to be a part of this discussion. To me it is one that is very deep and multifaceted and very exciting and challenging. Some of the challenges [...]
