Collections stewardship, public knowledge, and participatory description
Then
In 2010, Helena Zinkham spoke with Voices from the collections side of the Library of Congress Flickr pilot. Her perspective began with physical picture collections and the longstanding experience of researchers bringing stories, corrections, questions, and specialist knowledge into the reading room.
Contribution
Helena showed that crowdsourcing was not a rupture with traditional stewardship so much as an extension of a familiar relationship: people encounter collections, notice things staff cannot possibly know alone, and contribute knowledge back. Flickr gave that interaction international scale.
What she tried
She helped select rights-appropriate collections, encouraged open commenting and tagging, worked with staff to evaluate contributions by hand, incorporated verified corrections into catalog records, and preserved valuable reminiscence by linking the Library’s records back to the Flickr conversations.
What happened
Flickr participants identified unknown places, supplied names and dates, created “then and now” comparisons, added geographic information, and routed photographs into special-interest communities. The project showed that public interaction could improve both discoverability and description.
What remains
Opening a collection is not the same as abandoning stewardship. The strongest model combines public contribution with professional verification, context, and a pathway for useful knowledge to return to the record.
Appearance in Voices
2010 — Library of Congress on partnering with Flickr and finding its voice in social media
Related critical questions
- How do we make knowledge more accessible without losing its meaning?
- Who gets to speak, and whose knowledge is heard?
- How do we preserve memory when the systems carrying it keep changing?
Related Voices
Michelle Springer · Mary Ockerbloom · Eric C. Kansa · Angelina Russo · Nina Simon
Revisit this Voice
A revisit could ask how cultural institutions should think about public contribution now that machine-generated description is joining human crowdsourcing—and what kinds of knowledge still require people who recognize a face, place, object, or memory because they have lived with it.