I’d like to propose a talk session to exchange ideas, opinions, and share experiences with the archivists and librarians (of course others are welcome!) who have been involved or asked or expected to be involved with their institutional anniversary celebrations.

Every institution wants to tell its story with a “timeline”, oral histories, stories&memories, multimedia presentations, exhibitions, online exhibitions, coffee-table books, etc. and they all need photographs, publications, files, facts and legends, and other “cool stuff”. Who do they call? Archivists and librarians… When do they call? When they need something “yesterday”!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be prepared or to be invited right in the planning stage? Well, as we know, things are not always perfect in the library world. So, please come to share or takeaway.

I would like to propose a session that could involve a series of interrelated topics of discussion including copyright, open access to scholarly materials, and digitization of texts that evade most people’s regular access.

I am thinking, first, of two basic scholarly archives as exempla: The Modernist Journals Project (MJP) (www.modjourn.org) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) (eebo.chadwyck.com/home). Both archives are rich veins of materials that used to only be available to those with the best libraries (or the best research funding). Have these online archives indeed revolutionized the democratic availability of information? Have they continued to limit access only to those privileged with institutional membership?

To structure this session, I’m thinking of a few basic questions.

• What goes into the creation of such projects?
• How do we justify either open access or paywalls?
• Do these archives indeed deliver a quality research experiences or might they falsely limit the scope of the curious student?
• What happens when a crowdsourcing community wishes to participate in an editorial or curated project that resists such participation?
• Does the prestige of creating such projects inhibit true exchange and development (i.e., the line on one’s CV as the founder of a database is different than becoming a contributor to someone else’s – is that a problem?)

At present, this is a set of ideas left purposefully hazy. My questions come out of my recent relationship to some of these scholarly archives and my curiosities about their future as research tools. Please help me develop & narrow this premise – I simply know that I’d like to do some group thinking about these archives and what they mean to humanities research.

This is a companion “play” session to the “talk” on crowdsourcing in the digital humanities. In this session we would visit various sites and contribute by reviewing menus, tagging photos, transcribing letters, etc.

We could share our thoughts informally during the process and more formally in a “debriefing” after our group crowdsourcing session. This is seen as a companion to the talk on crowd sourcing, but the two sessions could be compressed into one if necessary.

Possible sites on which to “play”:

• wardepartmentpapers.org
• diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/
• www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/
• menus.nypl.org/
• www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/tag_game/start.php
• www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/freeze_tag/start.php

Crowdsourcing is becoming more and more common in the digital humanities. Here is a sampling of projects which currently include crowdsourcing features:

• wardepartmentpapers.org
• diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/
• www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
• www.pepysdiary.com/
• www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project
• www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/
• menus.nypl.org/
• www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/tag_game/start.php
• www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/freeze_tag/start.php
• swem.wm.edu/news/fights-rights/transcription-project
• www.medici.org/

I would be interested in a discussion of how crowdsourcing can be used in digital humanities projects. Topics of discussion could include:

• How to  implement crowdsourcing
• Successes / Failures
• Strengths / Weaknesses
• Issues / Barriers

See also the proposal for a “play” crowdsourcing session.