After the Crowds Disperse

Over the past decade, cultural heritage organisations have increasingly turned to volunteers through citizen research (or crowdsourcing) platforms to help make their holdings digitally accessible for discovery and research. These platforms have proved to be highly successful, both in attracting and retaining the interest of volunteers, and in the rate and quality of data collected. They have provided a new and deeper level of engagement and attracted more diverse audiences to national collections. However, there are still significant hurdles to overcome to achieve seamless sharing and movement of data between institutional Collection Management Systems (CMS) and crowdsourcing platforms, and back again. If crowdsourcing is to fulfil the potential of its generous volunteers this break in the data cycle must be closed.