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LC Labs Letter October 2021

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October 2021

LC LABS LETTER
A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team

Our Projects

Collective Wisdom Workshops build toward crowdsourcing research agenda

On October 20 and 21, LC Labs staff co-hosted two days of workshops for crowdsourcing practitioners at cultural heritage organizations. This event was the penultimate activity of the Collective Wisdom project, led by Mia Ridge (British Library), Meghan Ferriter (LC Labs), and Samantha Blickhan (Zooniverse). The initiative has three core goals: 1) to foster an international community of practice featuring knowledge exchange, 2) to capture, then share, the state of the art in digitally enabled participation and crowdsourcing and 3) to generate a research agenda and shared understandings that can inform future collaborations.

The first day of the virtual workshops focused on community organizing and participant experiences and the second day highlighted important considerations for designing data models, workflows, and user experience of crowdsourcing projects.

The workshops welcomed participants from cultural institutions across the United States, Europe, and New Zealand. Meghan was also joined by Library of Congress colleague Lauren Algee, who represented the success and practice of the Library’s crowdsourced transcription program By the People. The participants used the collaboration methodology Liberating Structures to share successful practices and make progress together.

Read more and keep an eye out for the forthcoming white paper on crowdsourcing and cultural heritage at the Collective Wisdom website.

 

Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) initiative gains two new team members

Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud is a cross-organizational initiative exploring research services, researcher experiences, cloud infrastructure, and collections use. For the next four months, the team will benefit from the experience and perspective of two new members: Khadijah Camp and Tori Scheppele.

Khadijah and Tori are both Library of Congress staff who join LC Labs on a temporary assignment from other parts of the organization.  Khadijah joins us from the Library Collections and Services Group’s Employee Resources Management and Planning Division and Tori’s “home base” is with the Prints and Photographs Division.

When asked what they were looking forward to, Khadijah and Tori both said that they were really excited to get to know new colleagues. “I’m looking forward to getting to know the CCHC team and for the opportunity to further grow my skills” said Khadijah.

“I’m very excited to get to know another part of the Library, work with new colleagues, and contribute to work that will provide insight on how the Library can make large digital collections more accessible to users” said Tori.

Tori and Khadijah will draw on their cumulative experiences to document use cases and workflows in support of CCHC goals. They will also support CCHC events and webinars where we’ll share information about initiative progress and outcomes. Khadijah and Tori’s interest in learning and collaboration fit right in with the team’s values to be inviting, transparent, exploratory, and flexible, described in this blog post by Olivia Dorsey, a member of the CCHC team.

 

Curio

  • LC Labs to co-host “Humans in the Loop” workshop at the Fantastic Futures conference, December 9-10, 2021. We will partner with AVP to host a virtual workshop that will focus on designing engaging workflows to combine crowdsourcing and machine learning. More information and details to register can be found on the conference website.

 

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For more information about LC Labs, visit us at https://labs.loc.gov/

Questions? Contact LC Labs at [email protected]

Comments (2)

  1. I’m not quite sure how crowdsourcing is used in the context of cultural heritage.

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