University of Szeged Klebelsberg Library
In this lesson, we will take a closer look at the concept of community content development and the services that operate on this basis.
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.
Britannica Online defines crowdsourcing as follows:
“crowdsourcing, a framework that brings together a large and decentralized group of people for gathering data, solving a problem, or addressing a challenge. It typically occurs via digital platforms […] that enable interaction and data collection.”
“The concept of crowdsourcing is based on the idea that a diverse group of participants can often achieve better results, more efficiently, than a smaller and more homogenous pool of contributors.”
* Saves time, energy, and money
* Possibility of outsourcing to competent professionals
* Faster delivery due to the distribution of tasks
* Increased likelihood of imprecision or errors in work
* Confidential information could be leaked more easily
* Misunderstanding, misdirection, failure to recognise opportunities for further development.
Main types of crowdsourcing (source):
The types below are of the knowledge and creation type, where everyone adds their own knowledge about a topic, image, place, etc. However, it is important to review this information, so sites should have editors and administrators who manage, organise, format and maintain the content they share.
Hungaricana aims to provide access to digitized public collections available at Hungarian institutions.
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.
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.
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.
Members of the community can upload documents (their own images) or help organise the data (by providing a location, who is in the picture, when and where it was taken, etc.), making the database administrators’ job easier.
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.
The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has already been mentioned as an online encyclopaedia through community content development. The video below shows the rest of Wikimedia.