An open platform for digitised cultural items
A lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata affects the searchability and usability of digital content stored in museums, libraries and archives. In this context, crowdsourcing offers a great opportunity both to improve the metadata quality of digital cultural content and raise awareness about cultural heritage assets among professionals, teachers, students and culture lovers. Running from September 2018 to February 2020, CrowdHeritage is a Europeana Generic Services project which looks to take advantage of this opportunity through the development of an open platform where public audiences can participate in crowdsourcing campaigns around cultural heritage. Campaigns on the website focus on music, fashion, sport, cities and landscapes.
The project aims to engage different communities in enhancing content metadata, evaluate the usability of the platform and assess the effectiveness of the overall approach, both in terms of data quality improvement and user engagement. The platform also offers cultural heritage institutions and aggregators the opportunity to design and launch ad-hoc crowdsourcing campaigns for metadata quality improvement with gamification elements and measurable results. The platform is available in three different languages (English, French, Italian) and is easy to access through digital devices. CrowdHeritage is for everyone - a simple and fun way to discover the richness and variety of cultural heritage.