University of Szeged Klebelsberg Library
Today, there are countless databases that contain collections of photos, movies, museum materials as well as materials that showcase the work of scholars and scientists.
Some of these databases are community-based (Fortepan), while others are operated by libraries or by academic communities (SZTE Klebelsberg Library Gallery and Media Library, Videotorium).
These databases are covered in a series of three lessons as follows:
Media Libraries: University Video Databases and Educational Video Databases
Community-based Content Development: Trove, Fortepan, Hungaricana [Current lesson]
SZTE Klebelsberg Library Gallery and Media Library
This second lesson focuses on three major community-driven content development platforms.
It is strongly related to crowdsourcing, which is a term coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine in 2006 to describe how some companies outsource work to private individuals online.
Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as follows:
“The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of “crowd” and “outsourcing”. [...] Crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. [...] Crowdsourcing can either take an explicit or an implicit route. Explicit crowdsourcing lets users work together to evaluate, share, and build different specific tasks, while implicit crowdsourcing means that users solve a problem as a side effect of something else they are doing.”
Source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
Saves time, energy, and money
Possibility of outsourcing to competent professionals
Reduced amount of time required for completion due to division of tasks
Increased likelihood of imprecision or errors in work
Heightened risk of the confidentiality of information being breached
Misunderstanding, misguidedness, potential failure to recognize future prospects
Main types of crowdsourcing (Source):
The crowdsourced sites discussed here focus on knowledge and creation, as seen in the case of Wikipedia, for example, or, when it comes to image collection sites, in the case of Fortepan.
On the Fortepan site, it is the “masses”, or members of the community, themselves that upload documents (i.e., their own photos) to the site. They also make the task of organizing data easier (by specifying where and when the photos were taken, and by identifying persons in the photos). This kind of contribution simplifies and speeds up the process of database maintenance.
It is very important to note that data provided by members of the community, acting in cooperation, should always be thoroughly verified. This entails that community sites should have editors and administrators, who are in charge of managing, organizing, formatting, and maintaining the files shared by members of the community.
Trove is an Australian platform that provides access to digital copies of the collections of numerous Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries, and archives. Trove’s partners contribute to the website with their digital collections, which are then customized, by professionals as well members of the community, to be made available through Trove or Trove Partner websites.
Source
a. 1 million digitized journal pages (with digitization funded by partners); 11 million newspaper pages
b. 231 million digitized articles and audio recordings
c. Over 1,500 digitized newspapers, including 38 migrant community newspapers
d. 1 million articles in foreign languages (non-English)
Trove aims to provide access to Australia’s cultural collections to the greatest extent possible, focusing on the following:
Allowing partners to import their physical, digital, or online collections to Trove, and to add relevant descriptions
Assisting partners in digitizing their collections, including the digitization of items potentially missing from their collections, such as local newspapers or journals
Helping partners manage their collections by cataloging, drawing on a national database, and embedding links from records in Trove directly into their own catalogs
Helping partners by providing them statistical, strategic, and business data
Trove’s features based on contributions by members of the community include:
Lists of items selected from the collection based on various criteria or research interests can be private or collaborative.
Volunteers can add notes to almost every item in the Trove collection, and these notes generally include relevant information data, dates, or location information in connection with the given items.
Volunteers can add additional keywords to items to make them easier to find, with tags describing things such as a topic, a place, an event, a person, a feeling, or even personal progress in research.
Volunteers can correct text transcripts (provided for items in the collection) if they notice any errors in such transcripts.
Volunteers can add categories to the lists of categories to which articles are assigned in order to provide specific details that make finding such articles easier.
Volunteers can add images to Trove through Flickr (which is an image hosting website) to enrich the way in which Australian culture is presented in Trove’s collection (with images of festivals, historical events, cities, or even landscapes).
Fortepan is a Hungarian community-based photo archive site, where visitors can browse and download over a hundred thousand archived photos. The material available on the site is free to use, with only attribution to the respective sources of downloaded images required.
“This website was launched in 2010 and it initially contained discarded photographs found randomly in the streets of Budapest. The archive has expanded since then through donations from families, amateur and professional photographers, along with public collections. The images on the website are selected by editors. The descriptions attached to the images are compiled and edited by volunteers.”
Source
Fortepan: https://fortepan.hu/en/
Visitors of the Fortepan site can now not only browse images but also use a separate feature for viewing recently added items. In addition, the search bar allows users to search by location or name, or to enter simple search terms. However, images can also be browsed specifically for a particular period by using the timeline slider to select the required year.
For instance, users can search for images of Szeged from the 1980s. The video tutorial shows how many and what kinds of documents can be found this way.
Hungaricana aims to provide access to digitized public collections available at Hungarian institutions.
Source: About Hungaricana
Hungaricana is not a single database but a collection of different databases that contain documents collected in cooperation with academic institutions and users to cover various subjects.
This database contains tens of thousands of documents, including graphics, postcards, photos, and images of tapestry and artwork, even allowing users to search in the Fortepan database.
This database provides access to materials in a wide range of collections, including local history collections, archives, document archives, and specialized library collections. These collections contain numerous items that were originally published in small numbers and distributed on a limited scale, with many of them physically available today only in a few collections.
The database contains items of the largest Hungarian map collections.
This database allows users to see how the structure of the city of Budapest has been transformed over time. Users can also view aerial photographs that offer a glimpse of the state Budapest was in during World War II, or they can see what happened in various parts of the city during the events of the 1956 revolution.
The database contains the sound archive and notations of folk music collections. It also contains Zoltán Kodály’s manuscript collection of melodies.
Depending on their field of research, anyone can find many useful databases with freely available resources. Among the multitude of materials, users may browse educational videos, ancient historical maps, or old photos revealing the history of various cities. It is also possible to personally contribute to the enhancement of these collections if someone has the time to do so.