This past winter I volunteered at the Lyman Museum archive back home in Hilo that is has crowd sourced the older locals in order to identify the people and places in their historic black and white photo collection.
The way the archive/museum went about crowd sourcing in the past was to hold an event and have people write down who they could identify, or to have them call or email the archivist. While this method was great at getting people involved in history and excited about the identification process it resulted in masses of papers, often with messy, illegible writing, that need to be transcribed into the archival database and quite a lot of extra work for the archivist.
The current archivist is working to create a website/database for the newly digitized photographs so that people can post comments about who and what they identify in the photos. However, the population that the archives is trying to draw information from are people who are mostly over 60. Though the website will be a vast improvement on the process of identifying people and places in the photo collection, as it will be available 24/7 instead once in a blue moon when they hold an event/exhibition, it may be difficult to engage an older population (of course not all people older 60 are luddites, but the division of digital technology use between generations is apparent).
It leaves me wondering how libraries and archives can improve crowd sourcing from groups that are reluctant to participate or face barriers to participation.
P.S. A great question brought up by Casey Newbegin in the discussion board got me thinking about the process of validating identities and guaranteeing authenticity for archival and museum materials.
When IDing photos there is no guarantee that the person identified is who the idnetifier says. Maybe the identifier has bad eye sight (a distinct possibility for people who are 60+). Who knows? The Lyman Museum has been able to validate identities by receiving the same information several times in some cases with the system of exhibition, email and phone calls. However, if and when the new website with commenting capabilities goes live it can be assumed that this will disappear as people browse comments, notice someone else has already ID’ed the person they recognize and leave the page. Perhaps by adding a ‘like’ function people who would otherwise lurk and leave will give their opinion on the validity of a comment through a little thumbs up?