User benefits and crowdsourcing - articles in the spotlight

Abstract

Today we are living in an environment where large user groups want to create and re-create collections for their own needs in collaboration with the communities.

The National Library of Finland will launch one of the first article crowdsourcing projects worldwide in the summer 2013, just in time for the Singapore IFLA Conference. The project was managed by the Scrum-method – an agile software development tool, where the user´s point of view is important.

We have created the crowdsourcing tools to enable clipping and adding metadata into the newspaper articles. This enables the users to collect articles in their own interest and to share their interest with others.

The crowdsourcing of articles is embedded into the Finnish Historical Newspaper Library, containing all copyright free newspapers published in Finland from 1771-1910. Later we will also use this crowdsourcing tool for newspapers in copyright. Newspaper houses have already shown an interest in the project and its findings.

What we need is to have a stable user base right from the start: people willing to use the features and also doing it. We hope to engage the large number of current users of the Finnish Historical Newspaper Library and others in community networking.