CrowdHeritage Platform

About the platform

Through the CrowdHeritage platform, cultural heritage institutions can set up and run custom crowdsourcing campaigns to involve culture enthusiasts, students, researchers and the general public in improving the quality of their collections. The platform allows participants to add various types of annotations to selected cultural records or validate existing ones, offering a unique way to engage European citizens with cultural heritage material. The platform is currently available in five languages (English, Italian, French, Greek and Spanish) and supports the use of multilingual vocabularies in the annotations.

Benefits of the platform

• Encourages people to work directly with digitised cultural heritage from across Europe

• Improves the quality and discoverability of online cultural heritage material, supporting its wider reuse

• Raises awareness of online collections, including among non-English speakers

Special features

• CrowdHeritage allows cultural content, such as datasets, galleries, or records, to be imported from Europeana.eu or the MINT aggregation platform.

• Existing annotations, generated by automatic tools and targeting specific Europeana records, can be imported to CrowdHeritage through the MINT aggregation platform as well.

• Registered users of the platform can add new annotations to CH items or validate annotations produced by automatic tools.

• The annotations produced in the context of a CrowdHeritage campaign can be exported as enrichments embedded in the metadata records to Europeana.eu via the MINT aggregation platform or via the Europeana Annotations API.

• The annotation model used in CrowdHeritage adheres to accessibility standards and is based on the W3C Annotation Model.

• Users can upvote/downvote annotations added by other users/peers, thus providing a mechanism of peer-reviewing for identifying questionable annotations and users with malicious or unreliable behaviour. A metric called “karma points” is calculated for each user as an indicator of high-quality contributors.

• A campaign page optimises item ranking for better annotation and task distribution; offers controlled public/private/restricted visibility; includes detailed custom instructions and information and allows users to view their progress and position in leaderboards.

• A moderation page allows campaign organisers to validate the results of a campaign and mark campaign annotations in bulk as accepted to be published.

• An overview page displays comprehensive campaign statistics, including contributors, collections, items, annotations, upvotes, downvotes, accepted/rejected annotations and more, all of them presented and visualised in a useful way.

• A campaign editor page allows campaign organisers to set up custom campaigns, provide relevant information (e.g. objectives, logo etc), select specific collections and annotation tasks to work with, and to import relevant linked data vocabularies.

The platform was developed under the Europeana Generic Services project CrowdHeritage and enhanced under the CRAFTED project.

Technical information

CrowdHeritage is an open-source platform that uses Europeana APIs and several other APIs from cultural institutions worldwide. The platform connects to Europeana.eu through the Europeana Search, Annotations, Record, User Sets and Entity APIs. The tool is only available on Github. It uses Apache 2.0 licence and documentation can be found here.

Use CrowdHeritage 

To learn more and use the CrowdHeritage platform to create tailored campaigns, visit the website and contact the project partners.