Information Technology Reference
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1. Members of the public were invited either to submit items in digital
form, or to attend special collection days at local libraries where their
relevant material was photographed. All material was then uploaded to
the website, where it could be searched for either in context with or
separately from the material related to the war poets. Additionally, a
Flickr group was constituted that enabled further dissemination of the
content gathered via the Great War Archive initiative.
The result was overwhelming, and in a few months over 6500 items
had been collected, including, according to the project website, 'diaries,
photographs, official documents, and even audio interviews with
veterans', with hundreds more items added to the Flickr group. As well
as offering their own collections to the website, the public were asked
to contribute to the metadata, often bringing unique knowledge related
to an item that was not to be found elsewhere. But perhaps of even
greater value was the broad community of interest that developed
around the content, using the websites, joining the Flickr group,
commenting on items and, in many cases, supplying authoritative
knowledge on the collections presented.
An interesting summary of the project also reveals another eye-
catching fact about such digitization projects open to the general public.
The report notes that what 'this initiative made clear was the potential for
economies of scale that tapping into the potential for mass amateur
digitization could produce' (Lindsay, 2009, 21). While each item in the
'official' Poetry Archive cost £40 to develop, publicly contributed digital
items in the Great War Archive cost £4 each to create. The report
continues: 'Whilst the quality of the items in the Great War Archive
could often be questionable, these figures do support the notion that
further investigation is warranted to assess the possibilities of engaging
the public directly to build community collections that are of educational
and historic value' (Lindsay, 2009, 21).
Historic Australian Newspapers
Another notable example of user engagement comes from the National
Library of Australia's Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803 to 1954 . 34 The
project is tackling the problem of the somewhat poor results of the
automated conversion of newspaper text from physical to digital format
(commonly known as optical character recognition, OCR) by inviting
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