As part of Project Andvari, a digital humanities initiative to aggregate early medieval northern European artifacts, it was deemed necessary to develop a semantically structured iconographic thesaurus to properly describe the iconographic content of distributed artifactual collections from a variety of contributing institutions. Developed according to SKOS-methodologies through open-access platforms, the thesaurus will ultimately be integrated into the project platform and made available for distributed implementation and linkages to broadly adopted authorities. Despite a solid conceptual foundation, project members were concerned about the resource’s ability to properly describe resources based on domain-specific scholarly practices. With this in mind, the project team partnered with Micropasts – a crowdsourcing platform sponsored by the British Museum – in order to create a Pybossa-based crowdsourcing application through which researchers, graduate students, and the public could test the thesaurus by applying terms and concepts to digital objects collected from the British Museum and the Swedish National Heritage Board. In this poster, we will present the underlying concept behind the utilization of crowdsourcing approaches to perform initial testing of a controlled vocabulary resource, highlighting the benefits of bringing multiple subjective perspectives to quality assurance efforts. The poster will also discuss the development of the crowdsourcing application in collaboration with the Micropasts team. Finally, the poster will present initial findings of the crowdsourcing initiative, analyzing term usage and recommended concepts in order to determine both the usability of our thesaurus and the feasibility of our quality assurance approach. The poster will finally present actionable recommendations for future projects interested in implementing crowdsourcing approaches to authority record testing and enhancement.
About the Authors:
Dr. Youngok Choi is an associate professor at the Department of Library and Information Science, the Catholic University of America. Her areas of research and teaching include digital library development, metadata management, image information seeking behavior, image indexing, digital cultural heritage information management, and user studies. She is a principle investigator of the Institute of Museum and Library Service (IMLS) project, “Cultural Heritage Information Management (CHIM): Educating 21st Century Cultural Heritage Information Professionals during 2012-2015”. Recently, she organized a public forum of Cultural Heritage Information Management (CHIM) (http://lis.cua.edu/chimforum/).
Joseph Koivisto recently completed his MSLIS from the Catholic University of America where he focused on the intersection of cultural heritage information management and digital approaches to librarianship. His work focused on the development of thesauri for application to cultural heritage collections in digital platforms. His work for Project Andvari and Syriac Heritage—two projects hosted at CUA — have helped to further the involvement of librarian professionals in innovative digital humanities initiatives. Joseph currently works for the Library of Congress and the DC Public Libraries. A co-authored article to which he contributed on controlled vocabularies has been submitted for publication.
