Enriching Europeana: the Crowdsourcing Platform of the European Library
Creators: name: Chung, Hui Ting
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019

description: As the digital platform for cultural heritage, the Europeana Collections preserve over 50 million digitised items from various libraries, museums and other cultural institutions. With digitisation comes the challenge of transforming these materials into useful and searchable information sources. This is particularly problematic for cultural heritage objects with handwritten texts. Digital images of handwritten documents are holding a lot of information that is not included in the metadata provided. The texts are difficult to decipher and it takes a lot of time to read, search and find them. Currently there are no accurate technical solutions for this problem. Automated Handwriting Recognition is a very difficult and error-prone task and technical solutions with high accuracy for character recognition on heterogeneous datasets are not available yet. Due to the lack of machine-interpretable text, it is not possible to perform a search based on the informational content and the covered topics. Similarly, it is presently not possible to use advanced AI technologies for performing exact automatic text processing. Thus, even with increasing automation, the transition from paper format into digitised items is not possible without human resources.

The Enriching Europeana project fills this gap by developing a crowdsourcing platform that will enable citizen science transcription and enrichment campaigns for a wide variety of digital heritage collections in the Europeana library. The aim is, on the one hand, to transcribe, annotate and translate content that is currently only available in image formats and, on the other hand, to improve the accessibility of Europeana content for a diverse group of people. Manual transcription of text material generates high-accuracy resources, supports a better understanding of materials and allows further reuse. It also facilitates the extraction of additional information such as dates, locations, subjects depicted (e.g. in the case of photos or illustrations) and relations with other resources. The newly created information will be integrated with the original collections and made available for the public user in the portals of Europeana, aggregators and content providers. By round-tripping enriched metadata and transcriptions, the Europeana metadata database will be improved and the improvements will be sustained.

The Enriching Europeana platform can be used by non-specialist end users: transcription and enrichment will become an easy, enjoyable and engaging task to perform and users will take part through gamification with competitions, ranking lists, levels and rewards. In order to bring a mixed user base together and to promote greater cross-generational cooperation in crowdsourcing activities, events, called ‘Transcribathons’, will be held during the lifetime of the Enriching Europeana project. A Transcribathon is a marathon-like competition where people form teams and compete against each other in the transcription of selected material within a fixed time. These events provide both a discussion platform and a learning platform.

European citizens will be able to make a meaningful contribution to their shared heritage through joining in the enrichment, transcription and translation activities of Enriching Europeana. By furthering the access to cultural heritage, their personal involvement holds a central role in the formation of European historical narratives.