2018 Washington conference submission
Bringing communities together: Archives, crowdsourcing and IIIF at the National Library of Wales
Manon Foster Evans - National Library of Wales (United Kingdom)
Abstract: The National Library of Wales (NLW) is one of the UK’s five legal deposit Libraries and was one of the early adopters of the IIIF standards. It has undertaken a number of ambitious projects which have led to millions of images from its rich and diverse collections being made available through IIIF to users throughout the world.
The Library’s new bilingual, customisable crowdsourcing platform, built by Digirati, using open standards including IIIF, has given the Library the opportunity to involve its community of volunteers in an exciting project to transcribe an archival collection of the Cardiganshire Great War Tribunal records. The creation of the platform follows on from lessons learnt from other successful crowdsourcing projects at the Library including the Cynefin programme in which over 1,000 digital volunteers contributed to the digitisation of the tithe maps of Wales.
This lightning talk will focus on the challenges of creopeating a flexible platform which delivers the functionality required for volunteers working with complex archival collections. It will highlight some of the benefits of using the IIIF open standard within the project and consider how the project has bought communities of volunteers, archivists and technical specialists together to create a platform which meets the needs of researchers and the general user. It will also consider how the open source platform can be enhanced in the future and offered to other organisations who may wish to deliver digital crowdsourcing projects, including the archival sector and community in Wales.
Presentation type: 7 minute lightning talk to be given in a plenary session
Topics:
- IIIF and archival collections,
- Discovery of IIIF resources
Keywords:
- archives,
- crowdsourcing,
- volunteering