ComunidadBNE: crowdsourcing at the National Library of Spain

Abstract

The National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE) recently launched ComunidadBNE (BNECommunity), a crowdsourcing project for the enrichment of its digital collections and data resources. It was developed within the Library’s global strategy and framework (BNElab) aimed at promoting access, public participation and engagement, use and reuse of the Library's data and digital resources.

ComunidadBNE is conceived as a digital environment of collaboration between general public, specialists and librarians, providing tools for cooperative transcription, georeferencing, identification or tagging of images from the Library’s digital collections, and also for the enrichment of the bibliographic and authorities catalogues. The platform was built on and developed as open source and also integrates external data sources.

This paper aims at sharing the technical basis, contribution and validation processes, initial results, strategy and future developments expected for the project. And how crowdsourcing has become an important tool for librarians and users to jointly enrich and contribute to re-create a common heritage, by building together this new Community.