What’s Welsh for
Crowdsourcing?: Citizen Science
at the National Library of Wales
Prof Lorna Hughes
@lornamhughes
Ymchwil
Research
www.llgc.org.uk/research

Ymchwil
Research
Digital Collections and the National Library of Wales
• Digitisation supports:
• Access to Welsh and Celtic
materials by global audience
• Preservation
• Collections enhancement and
reunification
• Transformation of scholarship
• Community engagement
• A cohesive, national collection
• Underlying principle: free
access to digital content
• www.llgc.org.uk

Ymchwil
Research
The National Digital Library of Wales
• A cohesive, national collection, with an underlying principle of free access
to digital content
• Based on internal expertise/capacity in the entire digital lifecycle:
selection, conservation, capture, management and preservation
• Copyright and other intellectual property rights cleared as a managed
part of digitisation process:
– Where material is on deposit and/or the current rights holders are
known, permission is requested: where declined, materials are not
used; when current rights holder is unknown, reasonable efforts are
made to identify and/or contact the rights holder
• Digitised resources licensed for re-use and re-purposing under an open
license (BY-NC-SA): Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-
Sharealike license
• Fee access is key to realising the potential community, social, research
and economic benefits of digitised resources

Ymchwil
Research
NLW Research Programme in Digital
Collections
UNDERSTANDING
USE
Understand use of
existing digital content
ENHANCING
CONTENT
Identify ways of
making existing digital
content more useful for
research, teaching or
community
engagement
DEVELOPING NEW
DIGITAL CONTENT
develop new digital
content that addresses
specific research or
education needs, in
partnership with
academics and other
key stakeholders
Bringing Digital Humanities to the Digital Library: llgc.org.uk/research

Research Programme in Digital Collections: Implementation
Ymchwil
Research
A collaborative research programme
• Around existing and emerging digital resources
• Engagement with academic communities,
nationally and internationally, and existing and
emerging communities of practice in Digital
Humanities
• A focus for digital humanities in Wales
Building sustainable digital resources that have
an impact on scholarship
• Develop strategic digitization initiatives
addressing specific research needs
• Foster interoperability and re-use of collections
• Increasing value and impact of digital
collections through use for research
Develop an understanding of the use, value and impact of digital collections:
for research, education and public engagement
Fostering engagement with the public
• Education, training and culture around NLW
collections
• Knowledge exchange: digitization, digital asset
management and use
Activities
• Research on digital collections development, use and discovery
• Project development, obtaining funding, developing new
initiatives
• Collaborations with partners in Wales and beyond
• Outreach, dissemination and publications
• 4 x PhD students in collaboration with Universities in Wales

Ymchwil
Research
Crowdsourcing at NLW
• NLW has a strong tradition of working with volunteers: Archives and Records
Association (ARA) fosters links links between repositories and user communities
• Volunteering, community participation and social inclusion on–going priorities in
NLW and Welsh Government agendas
• Co-operation with the crowd enables the Library to reach a wider audience of
engaged users
• Libraries and other cultural heritage organisations face unprecedented budget cuts,
fiscal austerity
• Increased increased opportunities for interaction between users and professionals.
• Encourage a sense of public ownership and responsibility to cultural heritage
collections
Crowdsourcing helps achieve goals that would otherwise be impossible due to lack
of time, finances and resources, adding to or enriching digital content

Models of crowdsourcing projects in libraries,
archives and museums
• Tasks relating to correction and transcription
Users correct and / or transcribe the products of digitisation processes
• Contextualisation
Adding further information about the context of a resource, e.g. by writing
or collecting oral evidence about a resource
• Adding to a collection
Looking for additional resources that can be included in an exhibition
(physical or virtual) or a collection
• Classification
Collecting descriptive metadata about resources in a collection. A common
example would be social tagging.
• Co-curation
Using the inspiration / expertise non-professional curators to create (physical
or virtual) exhibitions
Ymchwil
Research
• Based on work by Oomen & Aroyo (2011).

Ymchwil
Research
Cymru 1900 / Wales 1900
Developing a a gazetteer of Welsh place names from OS 6 inch maps
using a platform developed by Galaxy Zoo – launched October 2013
Crowdsourcing
Sourcing tasks traditionally
performed by specific individuals
to a group of people or
community (crowd) through an
open call: e.g., to help capture,
systematize or analyse large
amounts of data (“citizen
science”)
cymru1900wales.org
@cymru1900wales

Ymchwil
Research
Integrating crowdsourcing methods for archival
transcription
• Welsh Wills Online Developing transcriptions
and search interface for Welsh wills at NLW
• Extensive scoping of community
transcription of historical records
• Investigating feasibility of crowdsourcing
through workshops and testing
• Creating “Targetted crowdsourcing” working
with archivists, family and local historians,
and other experts
• Developing markup of content for
representation and analysis with users

Ymchwil
Research
‘The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather’
Building new collaborations & partnerships around digital research: Eira.llgc.org.uk

Community content: The Snows of yesteryear
Ymchwil
Research
Eira.llgc.org.uk

Ymchwil
Research
Rhyfel Byd a’r profiad Cymreig
Welsh experience of World War One
cymruww1.llgc.org.uk (Project Blog)
@CymruWW1
www.cymru1914.org

Ymchwil
Research
Community generated content
People’s Collection Wales Workshops for
Cymru1914.org
http://cymruww1.llgc.org.uk/2013/08/08/947/

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Research
www.walesatwar.org
Funded by

Wales at War: Crowdsourcing war memorial
data in Wales
Ymchwil
Research

Ymchwil
Research
Successful Implementation of Library
Crowdsourcing Projects
• Managing the overall quality and accuracy of contribution
• Managing copyright and intellectual property rights
• Overcoming issues of ‘trust’
• Planning the technological approach to be used: there is no ‘one
size fits all’ tool for all the different types of project
• Managing, supporting and engaging with ‘the crowd’ as an on–
going process
• Volunteer efforts should be acknowledged and rewarded through
public recognition, or emphasising their potential impact on
scholarly endeavour
• Overcoming these challenges is the key to successful projects.

Ymchwil
Research
Resources required
• Crowdsourcing does not require fewer resources!:
• Careful planning of the project from the start
• Creation of communities of interest around a specific project or
task
• Support for those communities until the tasks are completed
• Managing those who can contribute
• Training individuals for very specific tasks within a project
• Evaluating, moderating and editing contributions
• Selecting and implementing suitable technology platforms; and,
• Developing specific Library workflows to manage contributions,
integrating them into the Library's existing workflows

Ymchwil
Research
Cyfrannu torfol
• Cyfrannu torfol, ‘contribution of mass’ or ‘collective contributions’
• Consistent with concepts of collectivism, mass digitisation
• Crowdsourcing utilises the multiple perspectives of the crowd:
– Guiding idea: the capability of ‘the crowd’, based on collective
intelligence, collaboration and the aggregation of knowledge, is often
better than that of the individual
• Crowdsourcing uses social engagement methods to achieve
focussed, shared, large goals not achievable without a collective
approach
• Enables transformation of immersive interaction with Library
collections, encouraging the public to collaborate in the production
of new knowledge around Library collections.
• Allows Libraries to build new relationships with their audiences,
adding value to their collections and the organisation as a whole.

Ymchwil
Research
Reference:
• ‘What’s Welsh for Crowdsourcing? Citizen Science
and Community Engagement at the National Library
of Wales’, Lyn Dafis, Lorna Hughes, Rhian James, in
Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, Ed. Mia Ridge,
Ashgate, 2014

Ymchwil
Research
Thank you!
Prof Lorna Hughes
@lornamhughes
www.llgc.org.uk/research